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THE   CRIMES    OF    ENGLAND 


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THE  CRIMES  OF 
ENGLAND 


BY 

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AUTHOR  OF 

"heretics,"  "orthodoxy,"  "all  things  considered,"  etc. 


NEW  YORK 

JOHN  LANE  COMPANY 

MCMXVI 


Copyright,  1916, 
By  John  Lane  Company 


Press  of 

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NewYork.  U.  S.  A. 


M 


CONTENTS        V^^t^ 


CHAPTER  I 

rA6B 

Some  Words  to  Professor  Whirlwind  .  ii 
The  German  Professor,  his  need  of  Edu- 
cation for  Debate — Three  Mistakes  of  Ger- 
man Controversialists — The  Multiplicity  of 
Excuses — Falsehood  against  Experience — 
Kultur  preached  by  Unkultur — The  Mis- 
take about  Bernard  Shaw — German  Lack  of 
Welt-Politik — Where  England  is  really 
Wrong. 

CHAPTER  n 

The  Protestant  Hero 27 

Suitable  Finale  for  the  German  Em- 
peror— Frederick  II.  and  the  Power  of 
Fear — German  Influence  in  England  since 
Luther — Our  German  Kings  and  Allies — 
Triumph  of  Frederick  the  Great. 


CHAPTER  III 

The  Enigma  of  Waterloo     .        .        .        -45 
How  we  helped  Napoleon — The  Revolu- 
tion   and    the    Two    Germanies — Religious 

5 


Sboo't.? 


Contents 

Resistance  of  Austria  and  Russia — Irre- 
ligious Resistance  of  Prussia  and  England — 
Negative  Irreligion  of  England — its  Ideal- 
ism in  Snobbishness — Positive  Irreligion  of 
Prussia;  no  Idealism  in  Anything — Alle- 
gory and  the  French  Revolution — The  Dual 
Personality  of  England;  the  Double  Bat- 
tle— Triumph  of  Blucher. 


CHAPTER  IV 

The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries  .  .  .  6i 
The  Sad  Story  of  Lord  Salisbury — Ire- 
land and  Heligoland — The  Young  Men  of 
Ireland— The  Dirty  Work— The  Use  of 
German  Mercenaries — ^The  Unholy  Alli- 
ance— ^Triumph  of  the  German  Mercenaries. 


CHAPTER  V 

The  Lost  England 77 

Truth  about  England  and  Ireland — Mur- 
der and  the  Two  Travellers — Real  Defence 
of  England — The  Lost  Revolution — Story 
of  Cobbett  and  the  Germans — Historical 
Accuracy  of  Cobbett — Violence  of  the  Eng- 
lish Language — Exaggerated  Truths  versus 
Exaggerated  Lies — Defeat  of  the  People- 
Triumph  of  the  German  Mercenaries. 


Contents 


CHAPTER  VI 

PAGE 

Hamlet  and  the  Danes  .  .  .  •  95 
Degeneration  of  Grimm's  Fairy  Tales — 
From  Tales  of  Terror  to  Tales  of  Terror- 
ism— German  Mistake  of  being  Deep — The 
Germanisation  of  Shakespeare — Carlyle  and 
the  Spoilt  Child — The  Test  of  Teutonism — 
Hell  or  Hans  Andersen — Causes  of  Eng- 
lish Inaction — Barbarism  and  Splendid  Iso- 
lation— The  Peace  of  the  Plutocrats— Ham- 
let the  Englishman — The  Triumph  of  Bis- 
marck. 

CHAPTER  VH 

The  Midnight  OF  Europe  .  .  .  -113 
The  Two  Napoleons — Their  Ultimate 
Success — The  Interlude  of  Sedan — The 
Meaning  of  an  Emperor — The  Triumph  of 
Versailles — The  True  Innocence  of  Eng- 
land— Triumph  of  the  Kaiser. 

CHAPTER  VHI 

The  Wrong  Horse 127 

Lord  Salisbury  Again — The  Influence  of 
1870 — The  Fairy  Tale  of  Teutonism — The 
Adoration  of  the  Crescent — The  Reign  of 
the  Cynics — Last  Words  to  Professor 
Whirlwind. 


8  Contents 

CHAPTER  IX 

FACZ 

The  Awakening  of  England       .        .       .   I45 
The  March  of  Montenegro — The  Anti- 
Servile  State — The  Prussian  Preparation — 
The  Sleep  of  England — The  Awakening  of 
England. 

CHAPTER  X 

The  Battle  of  the  Marne    ....   163 
The  Hour  of   Peril— The   Human  Del- 
uge— The  English  at  the  Marne. 


THE  CRIMES    OF    ENGLAND 


I — Some  Words  to  Professor  Whirlwind 


Dear  Professor  Whirlwind, 

YOUR  name  in  the  original  Ger- 
man is  too  much  for  me ;  and  this 
is  the  nearest  I  propose  to  get  to 
it:  but  under  the  majestic  image 
of  pure  wind  marching  in  a  movement 
wholly  circular  I  seem  to  see,  as  in  a 
vision,  something  of  your  mind.  But  the 
grand  isolation  of  your  thoughts  leads  you 
to  express  them  in  such  words  as  are  grati- 
fying to  yourself,  and  have  an  inconspicu- 
ous or  even  an  unfortunate  effect  upon 
others.  If  anything  were  really  to  be  made 
of  your  moral  campaign  against  the  English 
nation,  it  was  clearly  necessary  that  some- 
body, if  it  were  only  an  Englishman,  should 
show  you  how  to  leave  off  professing  phi- 
losophy and  begin  to  practise  it.  I  have 
therefore  sold  myself  into  the  Prussian  serv- 
ice, and  in  return  for  a  cast-off  suit  of  the 
Emperor's  clothes  (the  uniform  of  an  Eng- 
lish midshipman),  a  German  hausfrau's 
recipe  for  poison  gas,  two  penny  cigars,  and 

II 


12  The  Crimes  of  England 

twenty-five  Iron  Crosses,  I  have  consented 
to  instruct  you  in  the  rudiments  of  interna- 
tional controversy.  Of  this  part  of  my  task 
I  have  here  Uttle  to  say  that  is  not  covered 
by  a  general  adjuration  to  you  to  observe 
certain  elementary  rules.  They  are,  rough- 
ly speaking,  as  follows : — 

First,  stick  to  one  excuse.  Thus  if  a 
tradesman,  with  whom  your  social  relations 
are  slight,  should  chance  to  find  you  toying 
with  the  coppers  in  his  till,  you  may  possibly 
explain  that  you  are  interested  in  Numis- 
matics and  are  a  Collector  of  Coins ;  and  he 
may  possibly  believe  you.  But  if  you  tell 
him  afterwards  that  you  pitied  him  for  be- 
ing overloaded  with  unwieldy  copper  discs, 
and  were  in  the  act  of  replacing  them  by  a 
silver  sixpence  of  your  own,  this  further 
explanation,  so  far  from  increasing  his  con- 
fidence in  your  motives,  will  (strangely 
enough)  actually  decrease  it.  And  if  you 
are  so  unwise  as  to  be  struck  by  yet  another 
brilliant  idea,  and  tell  him  that  the  pennies 
were  all  bad  pennies,  which  you  were  con- 
cealing to  save  him  from  a  police  prosecu- 
tion for  coining,  the  tradesman  may  even 
be  so  wayward  as  to  institute  a  police  prose- 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind      13 

cution  himself.  Now  this  is  not  in  any  way 
an  exaggeration  of  the  way  in  which  you 
have  knocked  the  bottom  out  of  any  case  you 
may  ever  conceivably  have  had  in  such  mat- 
ters as  the  sinking  of  the  Lusitania.  With 
my  own  eyes  I  have  seen  the  following  ex- 
planations, apparently  proceeding  from 
your  pen,  (i)  that  the  ship  was  a  troop-ship 
carrying  soldiers  from  Canada;  (ii)  that  if 
it  wasn't,  it  was  a  merchant-ship  unlawfully 
carrying  munitions  for  the  soldiers  in 
France;  (iii)  that,  as  the  passengers  on  the 
ship  had  been  warned  in  an  advertisement, 
Germany  was  justified  in  blowing  them  to 
the  moon;  (iv)  that  there  were  guns,  and 
the  ship  had  to  be  torpedoed  because  the 
English  captain  was  just  going  to  fire  them 
off;  (v)  that  the  English  or  American  au- 
thorities, by  throwing  the  Lusitania;  at  the 
heads  of  the  German  commanders,  subjected 
them  to  an  insupportable  temptation ;  which 
was  apparently  somehow  demonstrated  or 
intensified  by  the  fact  that  the  ship  came  up 
to  schedule  time,  there  being  some  mysteri- 
ous principle  by  which  having  tea  at  tea-time 
justifies  poisoning  the  tea;  (vi)  that  the  ship 
was  not  sunk  by  the  Germans  at  all  but  by 


14  The  Crimes  of  England 

the  English,  the  English  captain  having  de- 
liberately tried  to  drown  himself  and  some 
thousand  of  his  own  countrymen  in  order  to 
cause  an  exchange  of  stiff  notes  between  Mr. 
Wilson  and  the  Kaiser.  If  this  interesting 
story  be  true,  I  can  only  say  that  such  fran- 
tic and  suicidal  devotion  to  the  most  remote 
interests  of  his  country  almost  earns  the  cap- 
tain pardon  for  the  crime.  But  do  you  not 
see,  my  dear  Professor,  that  the  very  rich- 
ness and  variety  of  your  inventive  genius 
throws  a  doubt  upon  each  explanation  when 
considered  in  itself?  We  who  read  you  in 
England  reach  a  condition  of  mind  in  which 
it  no  longer  very  much  matters  what  ex- 
planation you  offer,  or  whether  you  offer 
any  at  all.  We  are  prepared  to  hear  that 
you  sank  the  Lusitania  because  the  sea-born 
sons  of  England  would  live  more  happily 
as  deep-sea  fishes,  or  that  every  person  on 
board  was  coming  home  to  be  hanged.  You 
have  explained  yourself  so  completely,  in 
this  clear  way,  to  the  Italians  that  they  have 
declared  war  on  you,  and  if  you  go  on  ex- 
plaining yourself  so  clearly  to  the  Ameri- 
cans they  may  quite  possibly  do  the  same. 
Second,  when  telling  such  lies  as  may 


Some  Words  to  Prof,  Whirlwind      15 

seem  necessary  to  your  international  stand- 
ing, do  not  tell  the  lies  to  the  people  who 
know  the  truth.  Do  not  tell  the  Eskimos 
that  snow  is  bright  green;  nor  tell  the  ne- 
groes in  Africa  that  the  sun  never  shines  in 
that  Dark  Continent.  Rather  tell  the  Es- 
kimos that  the  sun  never  shines  in  Africa; 
and  then,  turning  to  the  tropical  Africans, 
see  if  they  will  believe  that  snow  is  green. 
Similarly,  the  course  indicated  for  you  is  to 
slander  the  Russians  to  the  English  and  the 
English  to  the  Russians ;  and  there  are  hun- 
dreds of  good  old  reliable  slanders  which 
can  still  be  used  against  both  of  them.  There 
are  probably  still  Russians  who  believe  that 
every  English  gentleman  puts  a  rope  round 
his  wife's  neck  and  sells  her  in  Smithfield. 
There  are  certainly  still  Englishmen  who 
believe  that  every  Russian  gentleman  takes  a 
rope  to  his  wife's  back  and  whips  her  every 
day.  But  these  stories,  picturesque  and  use- 
ful as  they  are,  have  a  limit  to  their  use  like 
everything  else ;  and  the  limit  consists  in  the 
fact  that  they  are  not  true,  and  that  there 
necessarily  exists  a  group  of  persons  who 
know  they  are  not  true.  It  is  so  with  mat- 
ters of  fact  about  which  you  asseverate  so 


16  The  Crimes  of  England 

positively  to  us,  as  if  they  were  matters  of 
opinion.  Scarborough  might  be  a  fortress ; 
but  it  is  not.  I  happen  to  know  it  is  not. 
Mr.  Morel  may  deserve  to  be  universally  ad- 
mired in  England;  but  he  is  not  universally 
admired  in  England.  Tell  the  Russians  that 
he  is  by  all  means;  but  do  not  tell  us.  We 
have  seen  him;  we  have  also  seen  Scarbor- 
ough. You  should  think  of  this  before  you 
speak. 

Third,  don't  perpetually  boast  that  you 
are  cultured  in  language  which  proves  that 
you  are  not.  You  claim  to  thrust  yourself 
upon  everybody  on  the  ground  that  you  are 
stuffed  with  wit  and  wisdom,  and  have 
enough  for  the  whole  world.  But  people 
who  have  wit  enough  for  the  whole  world, 
have  wit  enough  for  a  whole  newspaper 
paragraph.  And  you  can  seldom  get 
through  even  a  whole  paragraph  without  be- 
ing monotonous,  or  irrelevant,  or  unintelli- 
gible, or  self -contradictory,  or  broken-mind- 
ed generally.  If  you  have  something  to  teach 
us,  teach  it  to  us  now.  If  you  propose  to 
convert  us  after  you  have  conquered  us, 
why  not  convert  us  before  you  have  con- 
quered us  ?    As  it  is,  we  cannot  believe  what 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind      17 

you  say  about  your  superior  education  be- 
cause of  the  way  in  which  you  say  it.  If 
an  Englishman  says,  "I  don't  make  no  mis- 
takes in  English,  not  me,"  we  can  under- 
stand his  remark ;  but  we  cannot  endorse  it. 
To  say,  "J^  parler  le  Frenche  language,  non 
demi,"  is  comprehensible,  but  not  convinc- 
ing. And  when  you  say,  as  you  did  in  a  re- 
cent appeal  to  the  Americans,  that  the  Ger- 
manic Powers  have  sacrificed  a  great  deal  of 
"red  fluid"  in  defence  of  their  culture,  we 
point  out  to  you  that  cultured  people  do  not 
employ  such  a  literary  style.  Or  when  you 
say  that  the  Belgians  were  so  ignorant  as 
to  think  they  were  being  butchered  when 
they  weren't,  we  only  wonder  whether  you 
are  so  ignorant  as  to  think  you  are  being 
believed  when  you  aren't.  Thus,  for  in- 
stance, when  you  brag  about  burning  Venice 
to  express  your  contempt  for  "tourists,"  we 
cannot  think  much  of  the  culture,  as  culture, 
which  supposes  St.  Mark's  to  be  a  thing  for 
tourists  instead  of  historians.  This,  how- 
ever, would  be  the  least  part  of  our  unfa- 
vourable judgment.  That  judgment  is  com- 
plete when  we  have  read  such  a  paragraph 
as  this,  prominently  displayed  in  a  paper  in 


18  The  Crimes  of  England 

which  you  specially  spread  yourself:  "That 
the  Italians  have  a  perfect  knowledge  of  the 
fact  that  this  city  of  antiquities  and  tourists 
is  subject,  and  rightly  subject,  to  attack  and 
bombardment,  is  proved  by  the  measures 
they  took  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  to  re- 
move some  of  their  greatest  art  treasures." 
Now  culture  may  or  may  not  include  the 
power  to  admire  antiquities,  and  to  restrain 
oneself  from  the  pleasure  of  breaking  them 
like  toys.  But  culture  does,  presumably,  in- 
clude the  power  to  think.  For  less  laborious 
intellects  than  your  own  it  is  generally  suf- 
ficient to  think  once.  But  if  you  will  think 
twice  or  twenty  times,  it  cannot  but  dawn 
on  you  that  there  is  something  wrong  in  the 
reasoning  by  which  the  placing  of  diamonds 
in  a  safe  proves  that  they  are  "rightly  sub- 
ject" to  a  burglar.  The  incessant  assertion 
of  such  things  can  do  little  to  spread  your 
superior  culture;  and  if  you  say  them  too 
often  people  may  even  begin  to  doubt 
whether  you  have  any  superior  culture  after 
all.  The  earnest  friend  now  advising  you 
cannot  but  grieve  at  such  incautious  garrul- 
ity. If  you  confined  yourself  to  single 
\yjDrds,  uttered  at  intervals  of  about  a  month 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind       19 

or  so,  no  one  could  possibly  raise  any  ra- 
tional objection,  or  subject  them  to  any  ra- 
tional criticism.  In  time  you  might  come  to 
use  whole  sentences  without  revealing  the 
real  state  of  things. 

Through  neglect  of  these  maxims,  my 
dear  Professor,  every  one  of  your  attacks 
upon  England  has  gone  wide.  In  pure  fact 
they  have  not  touched  the  spot,  which  the 
real  critics  of  England  know  to  be  a  very 
vulnerable  spot.  We  have  a  real  critic  of 
England  in  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  whose  name 
you  parade  but  apparently  cannot  spell ;  for 
in  the  paper  to  which  I  have  referred  he  is 
called  Mr.  Bernhard  Shaw.  Perhaps  you 
think  he  and  Bernhardi  are  the  same  man. 
But  if  you  quoted  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw's  state- 
ment instead  of  misquoting  his  name,  you 
would  find  that  his  criticism  of  England  is 
exactly  the  opposite  of  your  own;  and  nat- 
urally, for  it  is  a  rational  criticism.  He  does 
not  blame  England  for  being  against  Ger- 
many. He  does  most  definitely  blame  Eng- 
land for  not  being  sufficiently  firmly  and  em- 
phatically on  the  side  of  Russia.  He  is  not 
such  a  fool  as  to  accuse  Sir  Edward  Grey  of 
being  a  fiendish  Machiavelli  plotting  against 


20  The  Crimes  of  England 

Germany;  he  accuses  him  of  being  an  ami- 
able aristocratic  stick  who  failed  to  frighten 
the  Junkers  from  their  plan  of  war.  Now, 
it  is  not  in  the  least  a  question  of  whether 
we  happen  to  like  this  quality  or  that:  Mr. 
Shaw,  I  rather  fancy,  would  dislike  such 
verbose  compromise  more  than  downright 
plotting.  It  is  simply  the  fact  that  English- 
men like  Grey  are  open  to  Mr.  Shaw's  attack 
and  are  not  open  to  yours.  It  is  not  true 
that  the  English  were  sufficiently  clear- 
headed or  self-controlled  to  conspire  for  the 
destruction  of  Germany.  Any  man  who 
knows  England,  any  man  who  hates  Eng- 
land as  one  hates  a  living  thing,  will  tell  you 
it  is  not  true.  The  English  may  be  snobs, 
they  may  be  plutocrats,  they  may  be  hypo- 
crites, but  they  are  not,  as  a  fact,  plotters; 
and  I  gravely  doubt  whether  they  could  be  if 
they  wanted  to.  The  mass  of  the  people  are 
perfectly  incapable  of  plotting  at  all,  and  if 
the  small  ring  of  rich  people  who  finance  our 
politics  were  plotting  for  anything,  it  was 
for  peace  at  almost  any  price.  Any  Lon- 
doner who  knows  the  London  streets  and 
newspapers  as  he  knows  the  Nelson  column 
or  the  Inner  Circle,  knows  that  there  were 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind      21 

men  in  the  governing  class  and  in  the  Cabi- 
net who  were  literally  thirsting  to  defend 
Germany  until  Germany,  by  her  own  act,  be- 
came indefensible.  If  they  said  nothing  in 
support  of  the  tearing  up  of  the  promise  of 
peace  to  Belgium,  it  is  simply  because  there 
was  nothing  to  be  said. 

You  were  the  first  people  to  talk  about 
World-Politics;  and  the  first  people  to  dis- 
regard them  altogether.  Even  your  foreign 
policy  is  domestic  policy.  It  does  not  even 
apply  to  any  people  who  are  not  Germans; 
and  of  your  wild  guesses  about  some  twenty 
other  peoples,  not  one  has  gone  right  even 
by  accident.  Your  two  or  three  shots  at  my 
own  not  immaculate  land  have  been  such 
that  you  would  have  been  much  nearer  the 
truth  if  you  had  tried  to  invade  England  by 
crossing  the  Caucasus,  or  to  discover  Eng- 
land among  the  South  Sea  Islands.  With 
your  first  delusion,  that  our  courage  was  cal- 
culated and  malignant  when  in  truth  our 
very  corruption  was  timid  and  confused,  I 
have  already  dealt.  The  case  is  the  same 
with  your  second  favourite  phrase;  that  the 
British  army  is  mercenary.  You  learnt  it 
in  books  and  not  in  battlefields ;  and  I  should 


22  The  Crimes  of  England 

like  to  be  present  at  a  scene  in  which  you 
tried  to  bribe  the  most  miserable  little  loafer 
in  Hammersmith  as  if  he  were  a  cynical  con- 
dottiere  selling  his  spear  to  some  foreign 
city.  It  is  not  the  fact,  my  dear  sir.  You 
have  been  misinformed.  The  British  Army 
is  not  at  this  moment  a  hireling  army  any 
more  than  it  is  a  conscript  army.  It  is  a 
volunteer  army  in  the  strict  sense  of  the 
word;  nor  do  I  object  to  your  calling  it  an 
amateur  army.  There  is  no  compulsion,  and 
there  is  next  to  no  pay.  It  is  at  this  moment 
drawn  from  every  class  of  the  community, 
and  there  are  very  few  classes  which  would 
not  earn  a  little  more  money  in  their  ordi- 
nary trades.  It  numbers  very  nearly  as 
many  men  as  it  would  if  it  were  a  conscript 
army;  that  is  with  the  necessary  margin  of 
men  unable  to  serve  or  needed  to  serve  other- 
wise. Ours  is  a  country  in  which  that  demo- 
cratic spirit  which  is  common  to  Christen- 
dom is  rather  unusually  sluggish  and  far  be- 
low the  surface.  And  the  most  genuine  and 
purely  popular  movement  that  we  have  had 
since  the  Chartists  has  been  the  enlistment 
for  this  war.  By  all  means  say  that  such 
vague  and  sentimental  volunteering  is  value- 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind       23 

less  in  war  if  you  think  so;  or  even  if  you 
don't  think  so.  By  all  means  say  that  Ger- 
many is  unconquerable  and  that  we  cannot 
really  kill  you.  But  if  you  say  that  we  do 
not  realty  want  to  kill  you,  you  do  us  an  in- 
justice.   You  do  indeed. 

I  need  not  consider  the  yet  crazier  things 
that  some  of  you  have  said ;  as  that  the  Eng- 
lish intend  to  keep  Calais  and  fight  France 
as  well  as  Germany  for  the  privilege  of  pur- 
chasing a  frontier  and  the  need  to  keep  a 
conscript  army.  That,  also,  is  out  of  books, 
and  pretty  mouldy  old  books  at  that.  It 
was  said,  I  suppose,  to  gain  sympathy  among 
the  French,  and  is  therefore  not  my  imme- 
diate business,  as  they  are  eminently  capa- 
ble of  looking  after  themselves.  I  merely 
drop  one  word  in  passing,  lest  you  waste 
your  powerful  intellect  on  such  projects.  The 
English  may  some  day  forgive  you;  the 
French  never  will.  You  Teutons  are  too 
light  and  fickle  to  understand  the  Latin  seri- 
ousness. My  only  concern  is  to  point  out 
that  about  England,  at  least,  you  are  invari- 
ably and  miraculously  wrong. 

Now  speaking  seriously,  my  aear  Profes- 
sor, it  will  not  do.    It  could  be  easy  to  fence 


24  The  Crimes  of  England 

with  you  for  ever  and  parry  every  point 
you  attempt  to  make,  until  English  people 
began  to  think  there  was  nothing  wrong  with 
England  at  all.  But  I  refuse  to  play  for 
safety  in  this  way.  There  is  a  very  great 
deal  that  is  really  wrong  with  England,  and 
it  ought  not  to  be  forgotten  even  in  the  full 
blaze  of  your  marvellous  mistakes.  I  can- 
not have  my  countrymen  tempted  to  those 
pleasures  of  intellectual  pride  which  are  the 
result  of  comparing  themselves  with  you. 
The  deep  collapse  and  yawning  chasm  of 
your  ineptitude  leaves  me  upon  a  perilous 
spiritual  elevation.  Your  mistakes  are  mat- 
ters of  fact ;  but  to  enumerate  them  does  not 
exhaust  the  truth.  For  instance,  the  learned 
man  who  rendered  the  phrase  in  an  English 
advertisement  "cut  you  dead"  as  "hack  you 
to  death,"  was  in  error ;  but  to  say  that  many 
such  advertisements  are  vulgar  is  not  an  er- 
ror. Again,  it  is  true  that  the  English  poor 
are  harried  and  insecure,  with  insufficient 
instinct  for  armed  revolt,  though  you  will 
be  wrong  if  you  say  that  they  are  occupied 
literally  in  shooting  the  moon.  It  is  true  that 
the  average  Englishman  is  too  much  at- 
tracted by  aristocratic  society;  though  you 


Some  Words  to  Prof.  Whirlwind      25 

will  be  in  error  if  you  quote  dining  with 
Duke  Humphrey  as  an  example  of  it.  In 
more  ways  than  one  you  forget  what  is 
meant  by  idiom. 

I  have  therefore  thought  it  advisable  to 
provide  you  with  a  catalogue  of  the  real 
crimes  of  England ;  and  I  have  selected  them 
on  a  principle  which  cannot  fail  to  interest 
and  please  you.  On  many  occasions  we  have 
been  very  wrong  indeed.  We  were  very 
wrong  indeed  when  we  took  part  in  prevent- 
ing Europe  from  putting  a  term  to  the  impi- 
ous piracies  of  Frederick  the  Great.  We 
were  very  wrong  indeed  when  we  allowed 
the  triumph  over  Napoleon  to  be  soiled  with 
the  mire  and  blood  of  Blucher's  sullen  sav- 
ages. We  were  very  wrong  indeed  when  we 
allowed  the  peaceful  King  of  Denmark  to 
be  robbed  in  broad  daylight  by  a  brigand 
named  Bismarck;  and  when  we  allowed  the 
Prussian  swashbucklers  to  enslave  and  si- 
lence the  French  provinces  which  they  could 
neither  govern  nor  persuade.  We  were  very 
wrong  indeed  when  we  flung  to  such  hungry 
adventurers  a  position  so  important  as  Heli- 
goland. We  were  very  wrong  indeed  when 
we  praised  the  soulless  Prussian  education 


26  Tlie  Crimes  of  England 

and  copied  the  soulless  Prussian  laws. 
Knowing  that  you  will  mingle  your  tears 
with  mine  over  this  record  of  English 
wrong-doing,  I  dedicate  it  to  you,  and  I  re- 
main, 

Yours  reverently, 

G.  K.  CHESTERTON 


II — The  Protestant  Hero 


A  QUESTION  is  current  in  our 
looser  English  journalism  touch- 
ing what  should  be  done  with 
the  German  Emperor  after  a 
victory  of  the  Allies.  Our  more  feminine 
advisers  incline  to  the  view  that  he  should  be 
shot.  This  is  to  make  a  mistake  about  the 
very  nature  of  hereditary  monarchy.  As- 
suredly the  Emperor  William  at  his  worst 
would  be  entitled  to  say  to  his  amiable  Crown 
Prince  what  Charles  II.  said  when  his 
brother  warned  him  of  the  plots  of  assas- 
sins :  "They  will  never  kill  me  to  make  you 
king."  Others,  of  greater  monstrosity  of 
mind,  have  suggested  that  he  should  be  sent 
to  St.  Helena.  So  far  as  an  estimate  of  his 
historical  importance  goes,  he  might  as  well 
be  sent  to  Mount  Calvary.  What  we  have  to 
deal  with  is  an  elderly,  nervous,  not  unintel- 
ligent person  who  happens  to  be  a  Hohen- 
zollern;  and  who,  to  do  him  justice,  does 
think  more  of  the  Hohenzollerns  as  a  sacred 
caste  than  of  his  own  particular  place  in  it. 

27 


28  The  Crimes  of  England 

In  such  families  the  old  boast  and  motto  of 
hereditary  kingship  has  a  horrible  and  de- 
generate truth.  The  king  never  dies;  he 
only  decays  for  ever. 

If  it  were  a  matter  of  the  smallest  im- 
portance what  happened  to  the  Emperor 
William  when  once  his  house  had  been  dis- 
armed, I  should  satisfy  my  fancy  with  an- 
other picture  of  his  declining  years;  a  con- 
clusion that  would  be  peaceful,  humane,  har- 
monious, and  forgiving. 

In  various  parts  of  the  lanes  and  villages 
of  South  England  the  pedestrian  will  come 
upon  an  old  and  quiet  public-house,  deco- 
rated with  a  dark  and  faded  portrait  in  a 
cocked  hat  and  the  singular  inscription, 
"The  King  of  Prussia."  These  inn  signs 
probably  commemorate  the  visit  of  the  Al- 
lies after  1815,  though  a  great  part  of  the 
English  middle  classes  may  well  have  con- 
nected them  with  the  time  when  Frederick 
II.  was  earning  his  title  of  the  Great,  along 
with  a  number  of  other  territorial  titles  to 
which  he  had  considerably  less  claim.  Sin- 
cere and  simple-hearted  Dissenting  minis- 
ters would  dismount  before  that  sign  (for 
in   those  days   Dissenters  drank  beer  like 


The  Protestant  Hero  29 

Christians,  and  indeed  manufactured  most 
of  it)  and  would  pledge  the  old  valour  and 
the  old  victory  of  him  whom  they  called  the 
Protestant  Hero.  We  should  be  using  every 
word  with  literal  exactitude  if  we  said  that 
he  was  really  something  devilish  like  a  hero. 
Whether  he  was  a  Protestant  hero  or  not 
can  be  decided  best  by  those  who  have  read 
the  correspondence  of  a  writer  calling  him- 
self Voltaire,  who  was  quite  shocked  at 
Frederick's  utter  lack  of  religion  of  any 
kind.  But  the  little  Dissenter  drank  his 
beer  in  all  innocence  and  rode  on.  And  the 
great  blasphemer  of  Potsdam  would  have 
laughed  had  he  known;  it  was  a  jest  af- 
ter his  own  heart.  Such  was  the  jest  he 
made  when  he  called  upon  the  emperors  to 
come  to  communion,  and  partake  of  the 
eucharistic  body  of  Poland.  Had  he  been 
such  a  Bible  reader  as  the  Dissenter  doubt- 
less thought  him,  he  might  haply  have  fore- 
seen the  vengeance  of  humanity  upon  his 
house.  He  might  have  known  what  Poland 
was  and  was  yet  to  be ;  he  might  have  known 
that  he  ate  and  drank  to  his  damnation,  dis- 
cerning not  the  body  of  God. 

Whether  the  placing  of  the  present  Ger- 


30  The  Crimes  of  England 

man  Emperor  in  charge  of  one  of  these  way- 
side public-houses  would  be  a  jest  after  his 
own  heart  possibly  remains  to  be  seen.  But 
it  would  be  much  more  melodious  and  fitting 
an  end  than  any  of  the  sublime  euthanasias 
which  his  enemies  provide  for  him.  That 
old  sign  creaking  above  him  as  he  sat  on  the 
bench  outside  his  home  of  exile  would  be  a 
much  more  genuine  memory  of  the  real 
greatness  of  his  race  than  the  modern  and 
almost  gimcrack  stars  and  garters  that  were 
pulled  in  Windsor  Chapel.  From  modern 
knighthood  has  departed  all  shadow  of  chiv- 
alry ;  how  far  we  have  travelled  from  it  can 
easily  be  tested  by  the  mere  suggestion  that 
Sir  Thomas  Lipton,  let  us  say,  should  wear 
his  lady's  sleeve  round  his  hat  or  should 
watch  his  armour  in  the  Chapel  of  St. 
Thomas  of  Canterbury.  The  giving  and  re- 
ceiving of  the  Garter  among  despots  and 
diplomatists  is  now  only  part  of  that  sort  of 
pottering  mutual  politeness  which  keeps  the 
peace  in  an  insecure  and  insincere  state  of 
society.  But  that  old  blackened  wooden  sign 
is  at  least  and  after  all  the  sign  of  some- 
thing; the  sign  of  the  time  when  one  solitary 
Hohenzollern  did  not  only  set  fire  to  fields 


The  Protestant  Hero  31 

and  cities,  but  did  truly  set  on  fire  the  minds 
of  men,  even  though  it  were  fire  from  hell. 
Everything  was  young  once,  even  Fred- 
erick the  Great.  It  was  an  appropriate  pref- 
ace to  the  terrible  epic  of  Prussia  that  it 
began  with  an  unnatural  tragedy  of  the  loss 
of  youth.  That  blind  and  narrow  savage 
who  was  the  boy's  father  had  just  sufficient 
difficulty  in  stamping  out  every  trace  of 
decency  in  him,  to  show  that  some  such 
traces  must  have  been  there.  If  the  younger 
and  greater  Frederick  ever  had  a  heart,  it 
was  a  broken  heart ;  broken  by  the  same  blow 
that  broke  his  flute.  When  his  only  friend 
was  executed  before  his  eyes,  there  were  two 
corpses  to  be  borne  away;  and  one  to  be 
borne  on  a  high  war-horse  through  victory 
after  victory:  but  with  a  small  bottle  of  poi- 
son in  the  pocket.  It  is  not  irrelevant  thus 
to  pause  upon  the  high  and  dark  house  of  his 
childhood.  For  the  peculiar  quality  which 
marks  out  Prussian  arms  and  ambitions  from 
all  others  of  the  kind  consists  in  this  wrin- 
kled and  premature  antiquity.  There  is 
something  comparatively  boyish  about  the 
triumphs  of  all  the  other  tyrants.  There 
was  something  better  than  ambition  in  the 


32  The  Crimes  of  England 

beauty  and  ardour  of  the  young  Napoleon. 
He  was  at  least  a  lover;  and  his  first  cam- 
paign was  like  a  love-story.  All  that  was 
pagan  in  him  worshipped  the  Republic  as 
men  worship  a  woman,  and  all  that  was 
Catholic  in  him  understood  the  paradox  of 
Our  Lady  of  Victories.  Henry  VHL,  a 
far  less  reputable  person,  was  in  his  early 
days  a  good  knight  of  the  later  and  more 
florid  school  of  chivalry;  we  might  almost 
say  that  he  was  a  fine  old  English  gentleman 
so  long  as  he  was  young.  Even  Nero  was 
loved  in  his  first  days :  and  there  must  have 
been  some  cause  to  make  that  Christian 
maiden  cast  flowers  on  his  dishonourable 
grave.  But  the  spirit  of  the  great  Hohen- 
zollern  smelt  from  the  first  of  the  charnel. 
He  came  out  to  his  first  victory  like  one 
broken  by  defeats;  his  strength  was  stripped 
to  the  bone  and  fearful  as  a  fleshless  resur- 
rection; for  the  worst  of  what  could  come 
had  already  befallen  him.  The  very  con- 
struction of  his  kingship  was  built  upon  the 
destruction  of  his  manhood.  He  had  known 
the  final  shame ;  his  soul  had  surrendered  to 
force.  He  could  not  redress  that  wrong;  he 
could  only  repeat  it  and  repay  it.    He  could 


The  Protestant  Hero  33 

make  the  souls  of  his  soldiers  surrender  to 
his  gibbet  and  his  whipping-post;  he  could 
make  the  souls  of  the  nations  surrender  to 
his  soldiers.  He  could  only  break  men  in  as 
he  had  been  broken;  while  he  could  break 
in,  he  could  never  break  out.  He  could  not 
slay  in  anger,  nor  even  sin  with  simplicity. 
Thus  he  stands  alone  among  the  conquerors 
of  their  kind;  his  madness  was  not  due  to  a 
mere  misdirection  of  courage.  Before  the 
whisper  of  war  had  come  to  him  the  founda- 
tions of  his  audacity  had  been  laid  in  fear. 

Of  the  work  he  did  in  this  world  there  need 
be  no  considerable  debate.  It  was  romantic, 
if  it  be  romantic  that  the  dragon  should  swal- 
low St.  George.  He  turned  a  small  country 
into  a  great  one:  he  made  a  new  diplomacy 
by  the  fulness  and  far-flung  daring  of  his 
lies:  he  took  away  from  criminality  all  re- 
proach of  carelessness  and  incompleteness. 
He  achieved  an  amiable  combination  of 
thrift  and  theft.  He  undoubtedly  gave  to 
stark  plunder  something  of  the  solidity  of 
property.  He  protected  whatever  he  stole 
as  simpler  men  protect  whatever  they  have 
earned  or  inherited.  He  turned  his  hollow 
eyes  with  a  sort  of  loathsome  affection  upon 


34  The  Crimes  of  England 

the  territories  which  had  most  reluctantly 
become  his:  at  the  end  of  the  Seven  Years' 
War  men  knew  as  little  how  he  was  to  be 
turned  out  of  Silesia  as  they  knew  why  he 
had  ever  been  allowed  in  it.  In  Poland, 
like  a  devil  in  possession,  he  tore  asunder 
the  body  he  inhabited ;  but  it  was  long  before 
any  man  dreamed  that  such  disjected  limbs 
could  live  again.  Nor  were  the  effects  of 
his  break  from  Christian  tradition  confined 
to  Christendom;  Macaulay's  world-wide 
generalisation  is  very  true  though  very 
Macaulayese.  But  though,  in  a  long  view, 
he  scattered  the  seeds  of  war  all  over  the 
world,  his  own  last  days  were  passed  in  a 
long  and  comparatively  prosperous  peace ;  a 
peace  which  received  and  perhaps  deserved  a 
certain  praise:  a  peace  with  which  many 
European  peoples  were  content.  For  though 
he  did  not  understand  justice,  he  could  under- 
stand moderation.  He  was  the  most  genuine 
and  the  most  wicked  of  pacifists.  He  did  not 
want  any  more  wars.  He  had  tortured  and 
beggared  all  his  neighbours;  but  he  bore 
them  no  malice  for  it. 

The  immediate  cause  of  that  spirited  dis- 
aster, the  intervention  of  England  on  behalf 


The  Protestant  Hero  35 

of  the  new  Hohenzollern  throne,  was  due, 
of  course,  to  the  national  policy  of  the  first 
William  Pitt.  He  was  the  kind  of  man 
whose  vanity  and  simplicity  are  too  easily 
overwhelmed  by  the  obvious.  He  saw  noth- 
ing in  a  European  crisis  except  a  war  witK 
France;  and  nothing  in  a  war  with  France 
except  a  repetition  of  the  rather  fruitless 
glories  of  Agincourt  and  Malplaquet.  He 
was  of  the  Erastian  Whigs,  sceptical  but  still 
healthy-minded,  and  neither  good  enough 
nor  bad  enough  to  understand  that  even  the 
war  of  that  irreligious  age  was  ultimately  a 
religious  war.  He  had  not  a  shade  of  irony 
in  his  whole  being ;  and  beside  Frederick,  al- 
ready as  old  as  sin,  he  was  like  a  rather  bril- 
liant schoolboy. 

But  the  direct  causes  were  not  the  only 
causes,  nor  the  true  ones.  The  true  causes 
were  connected  with  the  triumph  of  one  of 
the  two  traditions  which  had  long  been 
struggling  in  England.  And  it  is  pathetic  to 
record  that  the  foreign  tradition  was  then 
represented  by  two  of  the  ablest  men  of  that 
age,  Frederick  of  Prussia  and  Pitt;  while 
what  was  really  the  old  English  tradition 
was  represented  by  two  of  the  stupidest  men 


36  The  Crimes  of  England 

that  mankind  ever  tolerated  in  any  age, 
George  III.  and  Lord  Bute.  Bute  was  the 
figurehead  of  a  group  of  Tories  who  set 
about  fulfilling  the  fine  if  fanciful  scheme 
for  a  democratic  monarchy  sketched  by  Bol- 
ingbroke  in  "The  Patriot  King."  It  was 
bent  in  all  sincerity  on  bringing  men's  minds 
back  to  what  are  called  domestic  affairs,  af- 
fairs as  domestic  as  George  III.  It  might 
have  arrested  the  advancing  corruption  of 
Parliaments  and  enclosure  of  country-sides, 
by  turning  men's  minds  from  the  foreign 
glories  of  the  great  Whigs  like  Churchill  and 
Chatham;  and  one  of  its  first  acts  was  to 
terminate  the  alliance  with  Prussia.  Unfor- 
tunately, whatever  was  picturesque  in  the 
piracy  of  Potsdam  was  beyond  the  imagina- 
tion of  Windsor.  But  whatever  was  prosaic 
in  Potsdam  was  already  established  at  Wind- 
sor; the  economy  of  cold  mutton,  the  heavy- 
handed  taste  in  the  arts,  and  the  strange 
northern  blend  of  boorishness  with  etiquette. 
If  Bolingbroke's  ideas  had  been  applied  by 
a  spirited  person,  by  a  Stuart,  for  example, 
or  even  by  Queen  Elizabeth  (who  had  real 
spirit  along  with  her  extraordinary  vulgar- 
ity), the  national  soul  might  have  broken  free 


The  Protestant  Hero  37 

from  its  new  northern  chains.  But  it  was 
the  irony  of  the  situation  that  the  King  to 
whom  Tories  appealed  as  a  refuge  from 
Germanism  was  himself  a  German. 

We  have  thus  to  refer  the  origins  of 
the  German  influence  in  England  back  to 
the  beginning  of  the  Hanoverian  Succes- 
sion ;  and  thence  back  to  the  quarrel  between 
the  King  and  the  lawyers  which  had  issue  at 
Naseby ;  and  thence  again  to  the  angry  exit 
of  Henry  VHI.  from  the  mediaeval  council 
of  Europe.  It  is  easy  to  exaggerate  the  part 
played  in  the  matter  by  that  great  and  hu- 
man, though  very  pagan  person,  Martin  Lu- 
ther. Henry  VHI.  was  sincere  in  his  hatred 
for  the  heresies  of  the  German  monk,  for 
in  speculative  opinions  Henry  was  wholly 
Catholic;  and  the  two  wrote  against  each 
other  innumerable  pages,  largely  consisting 
of  terms  of  abuse,  which  were  pretty  well  de- 
served on  both  sides.  But  Luther  was  not 
a  Lutheran.  He  was  a  sign  of  the  break-up 
of  Catholicism;  but  he  was  not  a  builder  of 
Protestantism.  The  countries  which  be- 
came corporately  and  democratically  Protes- 
tant, Scotland,  for  instance,  and  Holland, 
followed  Calvin  and  not  Luther.  And  Calvin 


38  The  Crimes  of  England 

was  a  Frenchman;  an  unpleasant  French- 
man, it  is  true,  but  one  full  of  that  French 
capacity  for  creating  official  entities  which 
can  really  act,  and  have  a  kind  of  impersonal 
personality,  such  as  the  French  Monarchy 
or  the  Terror,  Luther  was  an  anarchist,  and 
therefore  a  dreamer.  He  made  that  which 
is,  perhaps,  in  the  long  run,  the  fullest  and 
most  shining  manifestation  of  failure;  he 
made  a  name.  Calvin  made  an  active,  gov- 
erning, persecuting  thing,  called  the  Kirk. 
There  is  something  expressive  of  him  in  the 
fact  that  he  called  even  his  work  of  abstract 
theology  ''The  Institutes." 

In  England,  however,  there  were  elements 
of  chaos  more  akin  to  Luther  than  to  Calvin. 
And  we  may  thus  explain  many  things  which 
appear  rather  puzzling  in  our  history,  nota- 
bly the  victory  of  Cromwell  not  only  over 
the  English  Royalists  but  over  the  Scotch 
Covenanters.  It  was  the  victory  of  that 
more  happy-go-lucky  sort  of  Protestantism, 
which  had  in  it  much  of  aristocracy  but 
much  also  of  liberty,  over  that  logical  ambi- 
tion of  the  Kirk  which  would  have  made 
Protestantism,  if  possible,  as  constructive 
as  Catholicism  had  been.    It  might  be  called 


The  Protestant  Hero  39 

the  victory  of  Individualist  Puritanism  over 
Socialist  Puritanism.  It  was  what  Milton 
meant  when  he  said  that  the  new  presbyter 
was  an  exaggeration  of  the  old  priest ;  it  was 
his  office  that  acted,  and  acted  very  harshly. 
The  enemies  of  the  Presbyterians  were  not 
without  a  meaning  when  they  called  them- 
selves Independents.  To  this  day  no  one 
can  understand  Scotland  who  does  not  realise 
that  it  retains  much  of  its  mediaeval  sympa- 
thy with  France,  the  French  equality,  the 
French  pronunciation  of  Latin,  and,  strange 
as  it  may  sound,  is  in  nothing  so  French  as 
in  Its  Presbyterianism. 

In  this  loose  and  negative  sense  only  it 
may  be  said  that  the  great  modern  mistakes 
of  England  can  be  traced  to  Luther.  It  is 
true  only  in  this,  that  both  in  Germany  and 
England  a  Protestantism  softer  and  less  ab- 
stract than  Calvinism  was  found  useful  to 
the  compromises  of  courtiers  and  aristo- 
crats; for  every  abstract  creed  does  some- 
thing for  human  equality.  Lutheranism  in 
Germany  rapidly  became  what  it  is  to-day — 
a  religion  of  court  chaplains.  The  reformed 
church  in  England  became  something  better ; 
it  became  a  profession  for  the  younger  sons 


40  The  Crimes  of  England 

of  squires.  But  these  parallel  tendencies,  in 
all  their  strength  and  weakness,  reached,  as 
it  were,  symbolic  culmination  when  the  me- 
diaeval monarchy  was  extinguished,  and  the 
English  squires  gave  to  what  was  little  more 
than  a  German  squire  the  damaged  and 
diminished  crown. 

It  must  be  remembered  that  the  Germanics 
were  at  that  time  used  as  a  sort  of  breeding- 
ground  for  princes.  There  is  a  strange  proc- 
ess in  history  by  which  things  that  decay 
turn  into  the  very  opposite  of  themselves. 
Thus  in  England  Puritanism  began  as  the 
hardest  of  creeds,  but  has  ended  as  the  soft- 
est; soft-hearted  and  not  unfrequently  soft- 
headed. Of  old  the  Puritan  in  war  was 
certainly  the  Puritan  at  his  best ;  it  was  the 
Puritan  in  peace  whom  no  Christian  could 
be  expected  to  stand.  Yet  those  Englishmen 
to-day  who  claim  descent  from  the  great 
militarists  of  1649  express  the  utmost  horror 
of  militarism.  An  inversion  of  an  opposite 
kind  has  taken  place  in  Germany.  Out  of 
the  country  that  was  once  valued  as  provid- 
ing a  perpetual  supply  of  kings  small  enough 
to  be  stop-gaps,  has  come  the  modern  men- 
ace of  the  one  great  king  who  would  swallow 


The  Protestant  Hero  41 

the  kingdoms  of  the  earth.  But  the  old  Ger- 
man kingdoms  preserved,  and  were  encour- 
aged to  preserve,  the  good  things  that  go 
with  small  interests  and  strict  boundaries, 
music,  etiquette,  a  dreamy  philosophy,  and 
so  on.  They  were  small  enough  to  be  uni- 
versal. Their  outlook  could  afford  to  be  in 
some  degree  broad  and  many-sided.  They 
had  the  impartiality  of  impotence.  All  this 
has  been  utterly  reversed,  and  we  find  our- 
selves at  war  with  a  Germany  whose  powers 
are  the  widest  and  whose  outlook  is  the 
narrowest  in  the  world. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  the  English 
squires  put  themselves  over  the  new  German 
prince  rather  than  under  him.  They  put  the 
crown  on  him  as  an  extinguisher.  It  was 
part  of  the  plan  that  the  new-comer,  though 
royal,  should  be  almost  rustic.  Hanover 
must  be  one  of  England's  possessions  and 
not  England  one  of  Hanover's.  But  the  fact 
that  the  court  became  a  German  court  pre- 
pared the  soil,  so  to  speak;  English  politics 
were  already  subconsciously  committed  to 
two  centuries  of  the  belittlement  of  France 
and  the  gross  exaggeration  of  Germany. 
The  period  can  be  symbolically  marked  out 


42  The  Crimes  of  England 

by  Carteret,  proud  of  talking  German  at  the 
beginning  of  the  period,  and  Lord  Haldane, 
proud  of  talking  German  at  the  end  of  it. 
Culture  is  already  almost  beginning  to  be 
spelt  with  a  k.  But  all  such  pacific  and  only 
slowly  growing  Teutonism  was  brought  to 
a  crisis  and  a  decision  when  the  voice  of 
Pitt  called  us,  like  a  trumpet,  to  the  rescue  of 
the  Protestant  Hero. 

Among  all  the  monarchs  of  that  faithless 
age,  the  nearest  to  a  man  was  a  woman. 
Maria  Theresa  of  Austria  was  a  German 
of  the  more  generous  sort,  limited  in  a  do- 
mestic rather  than  a  national  sense,  firm  in 
the  ancient  faith  at  which  all  her  own  cour- 
tiers were  sneering,  and  as  brave  as  a  young 
lioness.  Frederick  hated  her  as  he  hated 
everything  German  and  .everything  good. 
He  sets  forth  in  his  own  memoirs,  with  that 
clearness  which  adds  something  almost  su- 
perhuman to  the  mysterious  vileness  of  his 
character,  how  he  calculated  on  her  youth, 
her  inexperience  and  her  lack  of  friends  as 
proof  that  she  could  be  despoiled  with  safety. 
He  invaded  Silesia  in  advance  of  his  own 
declaration  of  war  (as  if  he  had  run  on 
ahead  to  say  it  was  coming)  and  this  new 


The  Protestant  Hero  43 

anarchic  trick,  combined  with  the  corrupti- 
bility of  nearly  all  the  other  courts,  left  him 
after  the  two  Silesian  wars  in  possession  of 
the  stolen  goods.  But  Maria  Theresa  had 
refused  to  submit  to  the  immorality  of  nine 
points  of  the  law.  By  appeals  and  conces- 
sions to  France,  Russia,  and  other  powers, 
she  contrived  to  create  something  which, 
against  the  atheist  innovator  even  in  that 
atheist  age,  stood  up  for  an  instant  like  a 
spectre  of  the  Crusades.  Had  that  Crusade 
been  universal  and  whole-hearted,  the  great 
new  precedent  of  mere  force  and  fraud 
would  have  been  broken ;  and  the  whole  ap- 
palling judgment  which  is  fallen  upon  Chris- 
tendom would  have  passed  us  by.  But  the 
other  Crusaders  were  only  half  in  earnest 
for  Europe;  Frederick  was  quite  in  earnest 
for  Prussia;  and  he  sought  for  allies,  by 
whose  aid  this  weak  revival  of  good  might  be 
stamped  out,  and  his  adamantine  impudence 
endure  for  ever.  The  allies  he  found  were 
the  English.  It  is  not  pleasant  for  an  Eng- 
lishman to  have  to  write  the  words. 

This  was  the  first  act  of  the  tragedy,  and 
with  it  we  may  leave  Frederick,  for  we  are 
done  with  the  fellow  though  not  with  his 


44  The  Crimes  of  England 

work.  It  is  enough  to  add  that  if  we  call  all 
his  after  actions  satanic,  it  is  not  a  term  of 
abuse,  but  of  theology.  He  was  a  Tempter. 
He  dragged  the  other  kings  to  "partake  of 
the  body  of  Poland,"  and  learn  the  meaning 
of  the  Black  Mass.  Poland  lay  prostrate 
before  three  giants  in  armour,  and  her  name 
passed  into  a  synonym  for  failure.  The 
Prussians,  with  their  fine  magnanimity,  gave 
lectures  on  the  hereditary  maladies  of  the 
man  they  had  murdered.  They  could  not 
conceive  of  life  in  those  limbs;  and  the  time 
was  far  ofif  when  they  should  be  undeceived. 
In  that  day  five  nations  were  to  partake  not 
of  the  body,  but  of  the  spirit  of  Poland;  and 
the  trumpet  of  the  resurrection  of  the  peo- 
ples should  be  blown  from  Warsaw  to  the 
western  isles. 


Ill — The  Enigma  of  Waterloo 

THAT  great  Englishman  Charles 
Fox,  who  was  as  national  as 
Nelson,  went  to  his  death  with 
the  firm  conviction  that  England 
had  made  Napoleon.  He  did  not  mean,  of 
course,  that  any  other  Italian  gunner  would 
have  done  just  as  well ;  but  he  did  mean  that 
by  forcing  the  French  back  on  their  guns, 
as  it  were,  we  had  made  their  chief  gunner 
necessarily  their  chief  citizen.  Had  the 
French  Republic  been  left  alone,  it  would 
probably  have  followed  the  example  of  most 
other  ideal  experiments;  and  praised  peace 
along  with  progress  and  equality.  It  would 
almost  certainly  have  eyed  with  the  coldest 
suspicion  any  adventurer  who  appeared 
likely  to  substitute  his  personality  for  the 
pure  impersonality  of  the  Sovereign  People; 
and  would  have  considered  it  the  very  flower 
of  republican  chastity  to  provide  a  Brutus 
for  such  a  Caesar.  But  if  it  was  undesirable 
that  equality  should  be  threatened  by  a  citi- 
zen, it  was  intolerable  that  it  should  be  simply 

45 


46  The  Crimes  of  England 

forbidden  by  a  foreigner.  If  France  could 
not  put  up  with  French  soldiers  she  would 
very  soon  have  to  put  up  with  Austrian  sol- 
diers; and  it  would  be  absurd  if,  having  de- 
cided to  rely  on  soldiering,  she  had  hampered 
the  best  French  soldier  even  on  the  ground 
that  he  was  not  French.  So  that  whether 
we  regard  Napoleon  as  a  hero  rushing  to  the 
country's  help,  or  a  tyrant  profiting  by  the 
country's  extremity,  it  is  equally  clear  that 
those  who  made  the  war  made  the  war-lord ; 
and  those  who  tried  to  destroy  the  Republic 
were  those  who  created  the  Empire.  So,  at 
least.  Fox  argued  against  that  much  less 
English  prig  who  would  have  called  him 
unpatriotic;  and  he  threw  the  blame  upon 
Pitt's  Government  for  having  joined  the 
anti-French  alliance,  and  so  tipped  up  the 
scale  in  favour  of  a  military  France.  But 
whether  he  was  right  or  no,  he  would  have 
been  the  readiest  to  admit  that  England  was 
not  the  first  to  fly  at  the  throat  of  the  young 
Republic.  Something  in  Europe  much  vaster 
and  vaguer  had  from  the  first  stirred  against 
it.  What  was  it  then  that  first  made  war — 
and  made  Napoleon  ?  There  is  only  one  pos- 
sible answer:  the  Germans. 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  47 


This  is  the  second  act  of  our  drama  of  the 
degradation  of  England  to  the  level  of  Ger- 
many. And  it  has  this  very  important  de- 
velopment; that  Germany  means  by  this 
time  all  the  Germans,  just  as  it  does  to-day. 
The  savagery  of  Prussia  and  the  stupidity 
of  Austria  are  now  combined.  Mercilessness 
and  muddleheadedness  are  met  together; 
unrighteousness  and  unreasonableness  have 
kissed  each  other;  and  the  tempter  and  the 
tempted  are  agreed.  The  great  and  good 
Maria  Theresa  was  already  old.  She  had  a 
son  who  was  a  philosopher  of  the  school  of 
Frederick;  also  a  daughter  who  was  more 
fortunate,  for  she  was  guillotined.  It  was 
natural,  no  doubt,  that  her  brother  and  rela- 
tives should  disapprove  of  the  incident;  but 
it  occurred  long  after  the  whole  Germanic 
power  had  been  hurled  against  the  new  Re- 
public. Louis  XVI.  himself  was  still  alive 
and  nominally  ruling  when  the  first  pres- 
sure came  from  Prussia  and  Austria,  de- 
manding that  the  trend  of  the  French  eman- 
cipation should  be  reversed.  It  is  impossi- 
ble to  deny,  therefore,  that  what  the  united 
Germanics  were  resolved  to  destroy  was  the 
reform  and  not  even  the  Revolution.    The 


48  The  Crimes  of  England 

part  which  Joseph  of  Austria  played  in  the 
matter  is  symbolic.  For  he  was  what  is  called 
an  enlightened  despot,  which  is  the  worst 
kind  of  despot.  He  was  as  irreligious  as 
Frederick  the  Great,  but  not  so  disgusting 
or  amusing.  The  old  and  kindly  Austrian 
family,  of  which  Maria  Theresa  was  the  af- 
fectionate mother,  and  Marie  Antoinette  the 
rather  uneducated  daughter,  was  already  su- 
perseded and  summed  up  by  a  rather  dried- 
up  young  man  self-schooled  to  a  Prussian 
efficiency.  The  needle  is  already  veering 
northward.  Prussia  is  already  beginning  to 
be  the  captain  of  the  Germanics  ''in  shining 
armour."  Austria  is  already  becoming  a 
loyal  sekundant. 

But  there  still  remains  one  great  difference 
between  Austria  and  Prussia  which  de- 
veloped more  and  more  as  the  energy  of  the 
young  Napoleon  was  driven  like  a  wedge  be- 
tween them.  The  difference  can  be  most 
shortly  stated  by  saying  that  Austria  did,  in 
some  blundering  and  barbaric  way,  care  for 
Europe;  but  Prussia  cared  for  nothing  but 
Prussia.  Austria  is  not  a  nation;  you  can- 
not really  find  Austria  on  the  map.  But 
Austria  is  a  kind  of  Empire;  a  Holy  Roman 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  49 

Empire  that  never  came,  an  expanding  and 
contracting  dream.  It  does  feel  itself,  in  a 
vague  patriarchal  way,  the  leader,  not  of  a 
nation,  but  of  nations.  It  is  like  some  dying 
Emperor  of  Rome  in  the  decline ;  who  should 
admit  that  the  legions  had  been  withdrawn 
from  Britain  or  from  Parthia,  but  would 
feel  it  as  fundamentally  natural  that  they 
should  have  been  there,  as  in  Sicily  or  South- 
ern Gaul.  I  would  not  assert  that  the  aged 
Francis  Joseph  imagines  that  he  is  Emperor 
of  Scotland  or  of  Denmark;  but  I  should 
guess  that  he  retains  some  notion  that  if 
he  did  rule  both  the  Scots  and  the  Danes,  it 
would  not  be  more  incongruous  than  his  rul- 
ing both  the  Hungarians  and  the  Poles. 
This  cosmopolitanism  of  Austria  has  in  it  a 
kind  of  shadow  of  responsibility  for  Chris- 
tendom. And  it  was  this  that  made  the  dif- 
ference between  its  proceedings  and  those  of 
the  purely  selfish  adventurer  from  the  north, 
the  wild  dog  of  Pomerania. 

It  may  be  believed,  as  Fox  himself  came 
at  last  to  believe,  that  Napoleon  in  his  latest 
years  was  really  an  enemy  to  freedom,  in 
the  sense  that  he  was  an  enemy  to  that  very 
special    and   occidental    form   of    freedom 


50  The  Crimes  of  England 

which  we  call  Nationalism.  The  resistance 
of  the  Spaniards,  for  instance,  was  certainly 
a  popular  resistance.  It  had  that  peculiar, 
belated,  almost  secretive  strength  with 
which  war  is  made  by  the  people.  It  was 
quite  easy  for  a  conqueror  to  get  into  Spain ; 
his  great  difficulty  was  to  get  out  again.  It 
was  one  of  the  paradoxes  of  history  that  he 
who  had  turned  the  mob  into  an  army,  in 
defence  of  its  rights  against  the  princes, 
should  at  last  have  his  army  worn  down,  not 
by  princes  but  by  mobs.  It  is  equally  cer- 
tain that  at  the  other  end  of  Europe,  in  burn- 
ing Moscow  and  on  the  bridge  of  the  Bere- 
sina,  he  had  found  the  common  soul,  even  as 
he  had  found  the  common  sky,  his  enemy. 
But  all  this  does  not  affect  the  first  great 
lines  of  the  quarrel,  which  had  begun  before 
horsemen  in  Germanic  uniform  had  waited 
vainly  upon  the  road  to  Varennes  or  had 
failed  upon  the  miry  slope  up  to  the  windmill 
of  Valmy.  And  that  duel,  on  which  de- 
pended all  that  our  Europe  has  since  become, 
had  great  Russia  and  gallant  Spain  and  our 
own  glorious  island  only  as  subordinates  or 
seconds.  That  duel,  first,  last,  and  for  ever, 
was  a  duel  between  the  Frenchman  and  the 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  51 

German ;  that  is,  between  the  citizen  and  the 
barbarian. 

It  is  not  necessary  nowadays  to  defend 
the  French  Revolution,  it  is  not  necessary  to 
defend  even  Napoleon,  its  child  and  cham- 
pion, from  criticisms  in  the  style  of  Southey 
and  Alison,  which  even  at  the  time  had  more 
of  the  atmosphere  of  Bath  and  Cheltenham 
than  of  Turcoing  and  Talavera.  The  French 
Revolution  was  attacked  because  it  was 
democratic  and  defended  because  it  was 
democratic ;  and  Napoleon  was  not  feared  as 
the  last  of  the  iron  despots,  but  as  the  first 
of  the  iron  democrats.  What  France  set  out 
to  prove  France  has  proved ;  not  that  common 
men  are  all  angels,  or  all  diplomatists,  or  all 
gentlemen  (for  these  inane  aristocratic  il- 
lusions were  no  part  of  the  Jacobin  theory), 
but  that  common  men  can  all  be  citizens  and 
can  all  be  soldiers;  that  common  men  can 
fight  and  can  rule.  There  is  no  need  to  con- 
fuse the  question  with  any  of  those  esca- 
pades of  a  floundering  modernism  which 
have  made  nonsense  of  this  civic  common- 
sense.  Some  Free  Traders  have  seemed  to 
leave  a  man  no  country  to  fight  for;  some 
Free  Lovers  seem  to  leave  a  man  no  house- 


52  The  Crimes  of  England 

hold  to  rule.  But  these  things  have  not 
established  themselves  either  in  France  or 
anywhere  else.  What  has  been  established 
is  not  Free  Trade  or  Free  Love,  but  Free- 
dom ;  and  it  is  nowhere  so  patriotic  or  so  do- 
mestic as  in  the  country  from  which  it  came. 
The  poor  men  of  France  have  not  loved  the 
land  less  because  they  have  shared  it.  Even 
the  patricians  are  patriots ;  and  if  some  hon- 
est Royalists  or  aristocrats  are  still  saying 
that  democracy  cannot  organise  and  cannot 
obey,  they  are  none  the  less  organised  by  it 
and  obeying  it,  nobly  living  or  splendidly 
dead  for  it,  along  the  line  from  Switzerland 
to  the  sea. 

But  for  Austria,  and  even  more  for  Rus- 
sia, there  was  this  to  be  said ;  that  the  French 
Republican  ideal  was  incomplete,  and  that 
they  possessed,  in  a  corrupt  but  still  positive 
and  often  popular  sense,  what  was  needed 
to  complete  it.  The  Czar  was  not  demo- 
cratic, but  he  was  humanitarian.  He  was  a 
Christian  Pacifist;  there  is  something  of  the 
Tolstoyan  in  every  Russian.  It  is  not  wholly 
fanciful  to  talk  of  the  White  Czar :  for  Rus- 
sia even  destruction  has  a  deathly  softness 
as  of  snow.    Her  ideas  are  often  innocent 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  53 

and  even  childish;  Hke  the  idea  of  Peace. 
The  phrase  Holy  Alliance  was  a  beautiful 
truth  for  the  Czar,  though  only  a  blasphe- 
mous jest  for  his  rascally  allies,  Metternich 
and  Castlereagh.  Austria,  though  she  had 
lately  fallen  to  a  somewhat  treasonable  toy- 
ing with  heathens  and  heretics  of  Turkey  and 
Prussia,  still  retained  something  of  the  old 
Catholic  comfort  for  the  soul.  Priests  still 
bore  witness  to  that  mighty  mediaeval  insti- 
tution which  even  its  enemies  concede  to  be  a 
noble  nightmare.  All  their  hoary  political 
iniquities  had  not  deprived  them  of  that  dig- 
nity. If  they  darkened  the  sun  in  heaven, 
they  clothed  it  with  the  strong  colours  of  sun- 
rise in  garment  or  gloriole;  if  they  had  given 
men  stones  for  bread,  the  stones  were  carved 
with  kindly  faces  and  fascinating  tales.  If 
justice  counted  on  their  shameful  gibbets 
hundreds  of  the  innocent  dead,  they  could 
still  say  that  for  them  death  was  more  hope- 
ful than  life  for  the  heathen.  If  the  new 
daylight  discovered  their  vile  tortures,  there 
had  lingered  in  the  darkness  some  dim  mem- 
ory that  they  were  tortures  of  Purgatory  and 
not,  like  those  which  Parisian  and  Prussian 
diabolists  showed  shameless  in  the  sunshine. 


'54  The  Crimes  of  England 


of  naked  hell.  They  claimed  a  truth  not  yet 
disentangled  from  human  nature ;  for  indeed 
earth  is  not  even  earth  without  heaven,  as  a 
landscape  is  not  a  landscape  without  the  sky. 
And  in  a  universe  without  God  there  is  not 
room  enough  for  a  man. 

It  may  be  held,  therefore,  that  there  must 
in  any  case  have  come  a  conflict  between  the 
old  world  and  the  new;  if  only  because  the 
old  are  often  broad,  while  the  young  are  al- 
ways narrow.  The  Church  had  learnt,  not 
at  the  end  but  at  the  beginning  of  her  cen- 
turies, that  the  funeral  of  God  is  always  a 
premature  burial.  If  the  bugles  of  Bona- 
parte raised  the  living  populace  of  the  pass- 
ing hour,  she  could  blow  that  yet  more  revo- 
lutionary trumpet  that  shall  raise  all  the 
democracy  of  the  dead.  But  if  we  concede 
that  collision  was  inevitable  between  the  new 
Republic  on  the  one  hand  and  Holy  Russia 
and  the  Holy  Roman  Empire  on  the  other, 
there  remain  two  great  European  forces 
which,  in  different  attitudes  and  from  very 
different  motives,  determined  the  ultimate 
combination.  Neither  of  them  had  any  tinc- 
ture of  Catholic  mysticism.  Neither  of  them 
had  any  tincture  of  Jacobin  idealism.  Neither 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  55 

of  them,  therefore,  had  any  real  moral  reason 
for  being  in  the  war  at  all.  The  first  was 
England,  and  the  second  was  Prussia. 

It  is  very  arguable  that  England  must,  in 
any  case,  have  fought  to  keep  her  influence 
on  the  ports  of  the  North  Sea.  It  is  quite 
equally  arguable  that  if  she  had  been  as 
heartily  on  the  side  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion as  she  was  at  last  against  it,  she  could 
have  claimed  the  same  concessions  from  the 
other  side.  It  is  certain  that  England  had 
no  necessary  communion  with  the  arms  and 
tortures  of  the  Continental  tyrannies,  and 
that  she  stood  at  the  parting  of  the  ways. 
England  was  indeed  an  aristocracy,  but  a  lib- 
eral one;  and  the  ideas  growing  in  the  mid- 
dle classes  were  those  which  had  already 
made  America,  and  were  remaking  France. 
The  fiercest  Jacobins,  such  as  Danton,  were 
deep  in  the  liberal  literature  of  England. 
The  people  had  no  religion  to  fight  for,  as  in 
Russia  or  La  Vendee.  The  parson  was  no 
longer  a  priest,  and  had  long  been  a  small 
squire.  Already  that  one  great  blank  in  our 
land  had  made  snobbishness  the  only  religion 
of  South  England ;  and  turned  rich  men  into 
a  mythology.    The  effect  can  be  well  summed 


56  The  Crimes  of  England 


up  in  that  decorous  abbreviation  by  which 
our  rustics  speak  of  "Lady's  Bedstraw," 
where  they  once  spoke  of  *'Our  Lady's  Bed- 
straw."  We  have  dropped  the  comparatively 
democratic  adjective,  and  kept  the  aristo- 
cratic noun.  South  England  is  still,  as  it  was 
called  in  the  Middle  Ages,  a  garden ;  but  it 
is  the  kind  where  grow  the  plants  called 
"lords  and  ladies." 

We  became  more  and  more  insular  even 
about  our  continental  conquests;  we  stood 
upon  our  island  as  if  on  an  anchored  ship. 
We  never  thought  of  Nelson  at  Naples,  but 
only  eternally  at  Trafalgar;  and  even  that 
Spanish  name  we  managed  to  pronounce 
wrong.  But  even  if  we  regard  the  first  at- 
tack upon  Napoleon  as  a  national  necessity, 
the  general  trend  remains  true.  It  only 
changes  the  tale  from  a  tragedy  of  choice  to 
a  tragedy  of  chance.  And  the  tragedy  was 
that,  for  a  second  time,  we  were  at  one  with 
the  Germans. 

But  if  England  had  nothing  to  fight  for 
but  a  compromise,  Prussia  had  nothing  to 
fight  for  but  a  negation.  She  was  and  is, 
in  the  supreme  sense,  the  spirit  that  denies. 
It  is  as  certain  that  she  was  fighting  against 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  57 

liberty  in  Napoleon  as  it  is  that  she  was  fight- 
ing against  religion  in  Maria  Theresa.  What 
she  was  fighting  for  she  would  have  found 
it  quite  impossible  to  tell  you.  At  the  best, 
it  was  for  Prussia ;  if  it  was  anything  else, 
it  was  tyranny.  She  cringed  to  Napoleon 
when  he  beat  her,  and  only  joined  in  the 
chase  when  braver  people  had  beaten  him. 
She  professed  to  restore  the  Bourbons,  and 
tried  to  rob  them  while  she  was  restoring 
them.  For  her  ow^n  hand  she  would  have 
wrecked  the  Restoration  with  the  Revolu- 
tion. Alone  in  all  that  agony  of  peoples,  she 
had  not  the  star  of  one  solitary  ideal  to  light 
the  night  of  her  nihilism. 

The  French  Revolution  has  a  quality 
which  all  men  feel ;  and  which  may  be  called 
a  sudden  antiquity.  Its  classicalism  was  not 
altogether  a  cant.  When  it  had  happened  it 
seemed  to  have  happened  thousands  of  years 
ago.  It  spoke  in  parables;  in  the  hammer- 
ing of  spears  and  the  awful  cap  of  Phrygia. 
To  some  it  seemed  to  pass  like  a  vision;  and 
yet  it  seemed  eternal  as  a  group  of  statuary. 
One  almost  thought  of  its  most  strenuous 
figures  as  naked.  It  is  alw^ays  with  a  shock 
of  comicality  that  we  remember  that  its  date 


58  The  Crimes  of  England 

was  so  recent  that  umbrellas  were  fashion- 
able and  top-hats  beginning  to  be  tried.  And 
it  is  a  curious  fact,  giving  a  kind  of  complete- 
ness to  this  sense  of  the  thing  as  something 
that  happened  outside  the  world,  that  its  first 
great  act  of  arms  and  also  its  last  were  both 
primarily  symbols;  and  but  for  this  vision- 
ary character,  were  in  a  manner  vain.  It 
began  with  the  taking  of  the  old  and  almost 
empty  prison  called  the  Bastille ;  and  we  al- 
ways think  of  it  as  the  beginning  of  the 
Revolution,  though  the  real  Revolution  did 
not  come  till  some  time  after.  And  it  ended 
when  Wellington  and  Blucher  met  in  1815; 
and  we  always  think  of  it  as  the  end  of  Na- 
poleon; though  Napoleon  had  really  fallen 
before.  And  the  popular  imagery  is  right, 
as  it  generally  is  in  such  things :  for  the  mob 
is  an  artist,  though  not  a  man  of  science.  The 
riot  of  the  14th  of  July  did  not  specially 
deliver  prisoners  inside  the  Bastille,  but  it 
did  deliver  the  prisoners  outside.  Napoleon 
when  he  returned  was  indeed  a  revenant, 
that  is,  a  ghost.  But  Waterloo  was  all  the 
more  final  in  that  it  was  a  spectral  resurrec- 
tion and  a  second  death.  And  in  this  second 
case  there  were  other  elements  that  were  yet 


The  Enigma  of  Waterloo  59 

more  strangely  symbolic.  That  doubtful  and 
double  battle  before  Waterloo  was  like  the 
dual  personality  in  a  dream.  It  corresponded 
curiously  to  the  double  mind  of  the  English- 
man. We  connect  Quatre  Bras  with  things 
romantically  English  to  the  verge  of  sen- 
timentalism,  with  Byron  and  *'The  Black 
Brunswicker."  We  naturally  sympathise 
with  Wellington  against  Ney.  We  do  not 
sympathise,  and  even  then  we  did  not  really 
sympathise,  with  Blucher  against  Napoleon. 
Germany  has  complained  that  we  passed  over 
lightly  the  presence  of  Prussians  at  the  de- 
cisive action.  And  well  we  might.  Even 
at  the  time  our  sentiment  was  not  solely 
jealousy,  but  very  largely  shame.  Welling- 
ton, the  grimmest  and  even  the  most  unami- 
able  of  Tories,  with  no  French  sympathies 
and  not  enough  human  ones,  has  recorded  his 
opinion  of  his  Prussian  allies  in  terms  of 
curt  disgust.  Peel,  the  primmest  and  most 
snobbish  Tory  that  ever  praised  "our  gallant 
Allies"  in  a  frigid  official  speech,  could  not 
contain  himself  about  the  conduct  of  Blu- 
cher's  men.  Our  middle  classes  did  well  to 
adorn  their  parlours  with  the  picture  of  the 
"Meeting    of    Wellington    and    Blucher.'* 


60  The  Crimes  of  England 

They  should  have  hung  up  a  companion 
piece  of  Pilate  and  Herod  shaking  hands. 
Then,  after  that  meeting  amid  the  ashes  of 
Hougomont,  where  they  dreamed  they  had 
trodden  out  the  embers  of  all  democracy,  the 
Prussians  rode  on  before,  doing  after  their 
kind.  After  them  went  that  ironical  aristo- 
crat out  of  embittered  Ireland,  with  what 
thoughts  we  know ;  and  Blucher,  with  what 
thoughts  we  care  not;  and  his  soldiers  en-^ 
tered  Paris,  and  stole  the  sword  of  Joan  of 
Arc. 


IV — Tlie  Coming  of  the  Janissaries 

THE  late  Lord  Salisbury,  a  sad  and 
humorous  man,  made  many  pub- 
lic and  serious  remarks  that  have 
been  proved  false  and  perilous, 
and  many  private  and  frivolous  remarks 
which  were  valuable  and  ought  to  be  im- 
mortal. He  struck  dead  the  stiff  and  false 
psychology  of  ''social  reform,"  with  its  sug- 
gestion that  the  number  of  public-houses 
made  people  drunk,  by  saying  that  there 
were  a  number  of  bedrooms  at  Hatfield,  but 
they  never  made  him  sleepy.  Because  of  this 
it  is  possible  to  forgive  him  for  having  talked 
about  "living  and  dying  nations" :  though  it 
is  of  such  sayings  that  living  nations  die.  In 
the  same  spirit  he  included  the  nation  of 
Ireland  in  the  "Celtic  fringe"  upon  the  west 
of  England.  It  seems  sufficient  to  remark 
that  the  fringe  is  considerably  broader  than 
the  garment.  But  the  fearful  satire  of  time 
has  very  sufficiently  avenged  the  Irish  nation 
upon  him,  largely  by  the  instrumentality  of 
another  fragment  of  the  British  robe  which 

6l 


62  The  Crimes  of  England 

he  cast  away  almost  contemptuously  in  the 
North  Sea.  The  name  of  it  is  Heligoland; 
and  he  gave  it  to  the  Germans. 

The  subsequent  history  of  the  two  islands 
on  either  side  of  England  has  been  suffi- 
ciently ironical.  If  I^ord  Salisbury  had  fore- 
seen exactly  what  would  happen  to  Heligo- 
land, as  well  as  to  Ireland,  he  might  well 
have  found  no  sleep  at  Hatfield  in  one  bed- 
room or  a  hundred.  In  the  eastern  isle  he 
was  strengthening  a  fortress  that  would  one 
day  be  called  upon  to  destroy  us.  In  the 
western  isle  he  was  weakening  a  fortress  that 
would  one  day  be  called  upon  to  save  us.  In 
that  day  his  trusted  ally,  William  Hohen- 
zollern,  was  to  batter  our  ships  and  boats 
from  the  Bight  of  Heligoland;  and  in  that 
day  his  old  and  once-imprisoned  enemy,  John 
Redmond,  was  to  rise  in  the  hour  of  English 
jeopardy,  and  be  thanked  in  thunder  for  the 
free  offer  of  the  Irish  sword.  All  that  Rob- 
ert Cecil  thought  valueless  has  been  our  loss, 
and  all  that  he  thought  feeble  our  stay. 
Among  those  of  his  political  class  or  creed 
who  accepted  and  welcomed  the  Irish  lead- 
er's alliance,  there  were  some  who  knew  the 
real  past  relations   between   England   and 


Tlie  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      63 

Ireland,  and  some  who  first  felt  them  in 
that  hour.  All  knew  that  England  could  no 
longer  be  a  mere  mistress ;  many  knew  that 
she  was  now  in  some  sense  a  suppliant.  Some 
knew  that  she  deserved  to  be  a  suppliant. 
These  were  they  who  knew  a  little  of  the 
thing  called  history;  and  if  they  thought  at 
all  of  such  dead  catchwords  as  the  "Celtic 
fringe"  for  a  description  of  Ireland,  it  was 
to  doubt  whether  we  were  worthy  to  kiss  the 
hem  of  her  garment.  If  there  be  still  any 
Englishman  who  thinks  such  language  ex- 
travagant, this  chapter  is  written  to  en- 
lighten him. 

In  the  last  two  chapters  I  have  sketched 
in  outline  the  way  in  which  England,  partly 
by  historical  accident,  but  partly  also  by 
false  philosophy,  was  drawn  into  the  orbit 
of  Germany,  the  centre  of  whose  circle  was 
already  at  Berlin.  I  need  not  recapitulate  the 
causes  at  all  fully  here.  Luther  was  hardly 
a  heresiarch  for  England,  though  a  hobby 
for  Henry  VIII.  But  the  negative  German- 
ism of  the  Reformation,  its  drag  towards 
the  north,  its  quarantine  against  Latin  cul- 
ture, was  in  a  sense  the  beginning  of  the 
business.    It  is  well  represented  in  two  facts ; 


64  The  Crimes  of  England 

the  barbaric  refusal  of  the  new  astronomical 
calendar  merely  because  it  was  invented  by 
a  Pope,  and  the  singular  decision  to  pro- 
nounce Latin  as  if  it  were  something  else, 
making  it  not  a  dead  language  but  a  new  lan- 
guage. Later,  the  part  played  by  particular 
royalties  is  complex  and  accidental;  "the 
furious  German"  came  and  passed;  the 
much  less  interesting  Germans  came  and 
stayed.  Their  influence  was  negative  but 
not  negligible;  they  kept  England  out  of  that 
current  of  European  life  into  which  the  Gal- 
lophil Stuarts  might  have  carried  her.  Only 
one  of  the  Hanoverians  was  actively  Ger- 
man ;  so  German  that  he  actually  gloried  in 
the  name  of  Briton,  and  spelt  it  wrong.  In- 
cidentally, he  lost  America.  It  is  notable 
that  all  those  eminent  among  the  real 
Britons,  who  spelt  it  right,  respected  and 
would  parley  with  the  American  Revolution, 
however  jingo  or  legitimist  they  were;  the 
romantic  conservative  Burke,  the  earth- 
devouring  Imperialist  Chatham,  even,  in 
reality,  the  jog-trot  Tory  North.  The  in- 
tractability was  in  the  Elector  of  Hanover 
more  than  in  the  King  of  England;  in  the 
narrow  and  petty  German  prince  who  was 


The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      65 

bored  by  Shakespeare  and  approximately  in- 
spired by  Handel.  What  really  clinched  the 
unlucky  companionship  of  England  and 
Germany  was  the  first  and  second  alliance 
with  Prussia;  the  first  in  which  we  prevented 
the  hardening  tradition  of  Frederick  the 
Great  being  broken  up  by  the  Seven  Years' 
War;  the  second  in  which  we  prevented  it 
being  broken  up  by  the  French  Revolution 
and  Napoleon.  In  the  first  we  helped  Prus- 
sia to  escape  like  a  young  brigand;  in  the 
second  we  helped  the  brigand  to  adjudicate 
as  a  respectable  magistrate.  Having  aided 
his  lawlessness,  we  defended  his  legitimacy. 
We  helped  to  give  the  Bourbon  prince  his 
crown,  though  our  allies  the  Prussians  (in 
their  cheery  way)  tried  to  pick  a  few  jewels 
out  of  it  before  he  got  it.  Through  the 
whole  of  that  period,  so  important  in  history, 
it  must  be  said  that  we  were  to  be  reckoned 
on  for  the  support  of  unreformed  laws  and 
the  rule  of  unwilling  subjects.  There  is,  as 
it  were,  an  ugly  echo  even  to  the  name  of 
Nelson  in  the  name  of  Naples.  But  whatever 
is  to  be  said  of  the  cause,  the  work  which  we 
did  in  it,  with  steel  and  gold,  was  so  able  and 
strenuous  that  an  Englishman  can  still  be 


66  The  Crimes  of  England 

proud  of  it.  We  never  performed  a  greater 
task  than  that  in  which  we,  in  a  sense,  saved 
Germany,  save  that  in  which  a  hundred  years 
later,  we  have  now,  in  a  sense,  to  destroy 
her.  History  tends  to  be  a  fagade  of  faded 
picturesqueness  for  most  of  those  who  have 
not  specially  studied  it :  a  more  or  less  mono- 
chrome background  for  the  drama  of  their 
own  day.  To  these  it  may  well  seem  that  it 
matters  little  whether  we  were  on  one  side 
or  the  other  in  a  fight  in  which  all  the 
figures  are  antiquated;  Bonaparte  and 
Blucher  are  both  in  old  cocked  hats ;  French 
kings  and  French  regicides  are  both  not 
only  dead  men  but  dead  foreigners;  the 
whole  is  a  tapestry  as  decorative  and  as 
arbitrary  as  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  It  was 
not  so:  we  fought  for  something  real  when 
we  fought  for  the  old  world  against  the  new. 
If  we  want  to  know  painfully  and  precisely 
what  it  was,  we  must  open  an  old  and  sealed 
and  very  awful  door,  on  a  scene  which  was 
called  Ireland,  but  which  then  might  well 
have  been  called  hell. 

Having  chosen  our  part  and  made  war 
upon  the  new  world,  we  were  soon  made  to 
understand  what  such  spiritual  infanticide 


The  Coining  of  the  Janissaries      67 

involved;  and  were  committed  to  a  kind  of 
Massacre  of  the  Innocents.  In  Ireland  the 
young  world  was  represented  by  young  men, 
who  shared  the  democratic  dream  of  the 
Continent,  and  were  resolved  to  foil  the  plot 
of  Pitt;  who  was  working  a  huge  machine 
of  corruption  to  its  utmost  to  absorb  Ireland 
into  the  Anti- Jacobin  scheme  of  England. 
There  was  present  every  coincidence  that 
could  make  the  British  rulers  feel  they  were 
mere  abbots  of  misrule.  The  stiff  and  self- 
conscious  figure  of  Pitt  has  remained  stand- 
ing incongruously  purse  in  hand;  while  his 
manlier  rivals  were  stretching  out  their 
hands  for  the  sword,  the  only  possible  resort 
of  men  who  cannot  be  bought  and  refuse  to 
be  sold.  A  rebellion  broke  out  and  was  re- 
pressed ;  and  the  government  that  repressed 
it  was  ten  times  more  lawless  than  the  rebel- 
lion. Fate  for  once  seemed  to  pick  out  a 
situation  in  plain  black  and  white  like  an 
allegory;  a  tragedy  of  appalling  platitudes. 
The  heroes  were  really  heroes;  and  the  vil- 
lains were  nothing  but  villains.  The  com- 
mon tangle  of  life,  in  which  good  men  do 
evil  by  mistake  and  bad  men  do  good  by  ac- 
cident, seemed  suspended  for  us  as  for  a 


68  The  Crimes  of  England 


judgment.  We  had  to  do  things  that  not 
only  were  vile,  but  felt  vile.  We  had  to  de- 
stroy men  who  not  only  were  noble,  but 
looked  noble.  They  were  men  like  Wolfe 
Tone,  a  statesman  in  the  grand  style  who 
was  not  suffered  to  found  a  state ;  and  Rob- 
ert Emmet,  lover  of  his  land  and  of  a  woman, 
in  whose  very  appearance  men  saw  some- 
thing of  the  eagle  grace  of  the  young  Na- 
poleon. But  he  was  luckier  than  the  young 
Napoleon ;  for  he  has  remained  young.  He 
was  hanged;  not  before  he  had  uttered  one  of 
those  phrases  that  are  the  hinges  of  history. 
He  made  an  epitaph  of  the  refusal  of  an 
epitaph:  and  with  a  gesture  has  hung  his 
tomb  in  heaven  like  Mahomet's  coffin. 
Against  such  Irishmen  we  could  only  pro- 
duce Castlereagh;  one  of  the  few  men  in 
human  records  who  seem  to  have  been  made 
famous  solely  that  they  might  be  infamous. 
He  sold  his  own  country,  he  oppressed  ours ; 
for  the  rest  he  mixed  his  metaphors,  and  has 
saddled  two  separate  and  sensible  nations 
with  the  horrible  mixed  metaphor  called  the 
Union.  Here  there  is  no  possible  see-saw  of 
sympathies  as  there  can  be  between  Brutus 
and  Caesar  or  between  Cromwell  and  Charles 


The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      69 

I. :  there  is  simply  nobody  who  supposes  that 
Emmet  was  out  for  worldly  gain,  or  that 
Castlereagh  was  out  for  anything  else.  Even 
the  incidental  resemblances  between  the  two 
sides  only  served  to  sharpen  the  contrast  and 
the  complete  superiority  of  the  nationalists. 
Thus,  Castlereagh  and  Lord  Edward  Fitz- 
gerald were  both  aristocrats.  But  Castle- 
reagh was  the  corrupt  gentleman  at  the 
Court,  Fitzgerald  the  generous  gentleman 
upon  the  land;  some  portion  of  whose  blood, 
along  with  some  portion  of  his  spirit,  de- 
scended to  that  great  gentleman,  who — in  the 
midst  of  the  emetic  immoralism  of  our  mod- 
ern politics — gave  back  that  land  to  the  Irish 
peasantry.  Thus  again,  all  such  eighteenth- 
century  aristocrats  (like  aristocrats  almost 
anywhere)  stood  apart  from  the  popular 
mysticism  and  the  shrines  of  the  poor;  they 
were  theoretically  Protestants,  but  practical- 
ly pagans.  But  Tone  was  the  type  of  pagan 
who  refuses  to  persecute,  like  Gallio:  Pitt 
was  the  type  of  pagan  who  consents  to  perse- 
cute; and  his  place  is  with  Pilate.  He  was 
an  intolerant  indifferentist;  ready  to  enfran- 
chise the  Papists,  but  more  ready  to  massa- 
cre them.    Thus,  once  more,  the  two  pagans, 


70  The  Crimes  of  England 

Tone  and  Castlereagh,  found  a  pagan  end 
in  suicide.  But  the  circumstances  were  such 
that  any  man,  of  any  party,  felt  that  Tone 
had  died  like  Cato  and  Castlereagh  had  died 
like  Judas. 

The  march  of  Pitt's  policy  went  on;  and 
the  chasm  between  light  and  darkness  deep- 
ened. Order  was  restored;  and  wherever 
order  spread,  there  spread  an  anarchy  more 
awful  than  the  sun  has  ever  looked  on.  Tor- 
ture came  out  of  the  crypts  of  the  Inquisi- 
tion and  walked  in  the  sunlight  of  the  streets 
and  fields.  A  village  vicar  was  slain  with 
inconceivable  stripes,  and  his  corpse  set  on 
fire  with  frightful  jests  about  a  roasted 
priest.  Rape  became  a  mode  of  government. 
The  violation  of  virgins  became  a  standing 
order  of  police.  Stamped  still  with  the  same 
terrible  symbolism,  the  work  of  the  English 
Government  and  the  English  settlers  seemed 
to  resolve  itself  into  animal  atrocities  against 
the  wives  and  daughters  of  a  race  distin- 
guished for  a  rare  and  detached  purity,  and 
of  a  religion  which  makes  of  innocence  the 
Mother  of  God.  In  its  bodily  aspects  it 
became  like  a  war  of  devils  upon  angels;  as 
if  England  could  produce  nothing  but  tor- 


The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      71 

turers,  and  Ireland  nothing  but  martyrs. 
Such  was  a  part  of  the  price  paid  by  the 
Irish  body  and  the  English  soul,  for  the  privi- 
lege of  patching  up  a  Prussian  after  the 
sabre-stroke  of  Jena. 

But  Germany  was  not  merely  present  in 
the  spirit :  Germany  was  present  in  the  flesh. 
Without  any  desire  to  underrate  the  exploits 
of  the  English  or  the  Orangemen,  I  can 
safely  say  that  the  finest  touches  were  added 
by  soldiers  trained  in  a  tradition  inherited 
from  the  horrors  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War, 
and  of  what  the  old  ballad  called  "the  cruel 
wars  of  High  Germanic."  An  Irishman  I 
know,  whose  brother  is  a  soldier,  and  who 
has  relatives  in  many  distinguished  posts  of 
the  British  army,  told  me  that  in  his  child- 
hood the  legend  (or  rather  the  truth)  of  '98 
was  so  frightfully  alive  that  his  own  mother 
would  not  have  the  word  ^'soldier"  spoken  in 
her  house.  Wherever  we  thus  find  the  tra- 
dition alive  we  find  that  the  hateful  soldier 
means  especially  the  German  soldier.  When 
the  Irish  say,  as  some  of  them  do  say,  that 
the  German  mercenary  was  worse  than  the 
Orangemen,  they  say  as  much  as  human 
mouth  can  utter.    Beyond  that  there  is  noth- 


72  The  Crimes  of  England 

ing  but  the  curse  of  God,  which  shall  be  ut- 
tered in  an  unknown  tongue. 

The  practice  of  using  German  soldiers, 
and  even  whole  German  regiments,  in  the 
make-up  of  the  British  army,  came  in  with 
our  German  princes,  and  reappeared  on 
many  important  occasions  in  our  eighteenth- 
century  history.  They  were  probably  among 
those  who  encamped  triumphantly  upon 
Drumossie  Moor,  and  also  (which  is  a  more 
gratifying  thought)  among  those  who  ran 
away  with  great  rapidity  at  Prestonpans. 
When  that  very  typical  German,  George  III., 
narrow,  serious,  of  a  stunted  culture  and 
coarse  in  his  very  domesticity,  quarrelled 
with  all  that  was  spirited,  not  only  in  the 
democracy  of  America  but  in  the  aristocracy 
of  England,  German  troops  were  very  fitted 
to  be  his  ambassadors  beyond  the  Atlantic. 
With  their  well-drilled  formations  they  fol- 
lowed Burgoyne  in  that  woodland  march  that 
failed  at  Saratoga;  and  with  their  wooden 
faces  beheld  our  downfall.  Their  presence 
had  long  had  its  effect  in  various  ways.  In 
one  way,  curiously  enough,  their  very  mili- 
tarism helped  England  to  be  less  military; 
and  especially  to  be  more  mercantile.    It  be- 


The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      73 

gan  to  be  felt,  faintly  of  course  and  never 
consciously,  that  fighting  was  a  thing  that 
foreigners  had  to  do.  It  vaguely  increased 
the  prestige  of  the  Germans  as  the  military 
people,  to  the  disadvantage  of  the  French, 
whom  it  was  the  interest  of  our  vanity  to 
underrate.  The  mere  mixture  of  their  uni- 
forms with  ours  made  a  background  of  pa- 
geantry in  which  it  seemed  more  and  more 
natural  that  English  and  German  potentates 
should  salute  each  other  like  cousins,  and, 
in  a  sense,  live  in  each  other's  countries. 
Thus  in  1908  the  German  Emperor  was  al- 
ready regarded  as  something  of  a  menace  by 
the  English  politicians,  and  as  nothing  but  a 
madman  by  the  English  people.  Yet  it  did 
not  seem  in  any  way  disgusting  or  dangerous 
that  Edward  VII.  should  appear  upon  occa- 
sion in  a  Prussian  uniform.  Edward  VII. 
was  himself  a  friend  to  France,  and  worked 
for  the  French  Alliance.  Yet  his  appearance 
in  the  red  trousers  of  a  French  soldier  would 
have  struck  many  people  as  funny ;  as  funny 
as  if  he  had  dressed  up  as  a  Chinaman. 

But  the  German  hirelings  or  allies  had 
another  character  which  (by  that  same  strain 
of  evil  coincidence  which  we  are  tracing  in 


74  The  Crimes  of  England 

this  book)  encouraged  all  that  was  worsl 
in  the  English  conservatism  and  inequality, 
while  discouraging  all  that  was  best  in  it.  It 
is  true  that  the  ideal  Englishman  was  too 
much  of  a  squire;  but  it  is  just  to  add  that: 
the  ideal  squire  was  a  good  squire.  The  bes^ 
squire  I  know  in  fiction  is  Duke  Theseus  in 
"The  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,"  who  is 
kind  to  his  people  and  proud  of  his  dogs ;  and 
would  be  a  perfect  human  being  if  he  were 
not  just  a  little  bit  prone  to  be  kind  to  botK 
of  them  in  the  same  way.  But  such  natural 
and  even  pagan  good-nature  is  consonant 
with  the  warm  wet  woods  and  comfortable 
clouds  of  South  England;  it  never  had  any 
place  among  the  harsh  and  thrifty  squires  in 
the  plains  of  East  Prussia,  the  land  of  the 
East  Wind.  They  were  peevish  as  well  as 
proud,  and  everything  they  created,  but  espe- 
cially their  army,  was  made  coherent  by 
sheer  brutality.  Discipline  was  cruel  enough 
in  all  the  eighteenth-century  armies,  created 
long  after  the  decay  of  any  faith  or  hope 
that  could  hold  men  together.  But  the  state 
that  was  first  in  Germany  was  first  in  feroc- 
ity. Frederick  the  Great  had  to  forbid  his 
English  admirers  to  follow  his  regiments 


The  Coming  of  the  Janissaries      75 

during  the  campaign,  lest  they  should  dis- 
cover that  the  most  enlightened  of  kings  had 
only  excluded  torture  from  law  to  impose  it 
without  law.  This  influence,  as  we  have 
seen,  left  on  Ireland  a  fearful  mark  which 
will  never  be  eflfaced.  English  rule  in  Ire- 
land had  been  bad  before ;  but  in  the  broaden- 
ing light  of  the  revolutionary  century  I  doubt 
whether  it  could  fiave  continued  as  bad,  if  we 
had  not  taken  a  side  that  forced  us  to  flatter 
barbarian  tyranny  in  Europe.  We  should 
hardly  have  seen  such  a  nightmare  as  the 
Anglicising  of  Ireland  if  we  had  not  already 
seen  the  Germanising  of  England.  But  even 
in  England  it  was  not  without  its  effects; 
and  one  of  its  effects  was  to  rouse  a  man  who 
is,  perhaps,  the  best  English  witness  to  the 
effect  on  the  England  of  that  time  of  the 
Alliance  with  Germany.  With  that  man  I 
shall  deal  in  the  chapter  that  follows. 


V — The  Lost  England 


TELLING  the  truth  about  Ireland 
is  not  very  pleasant  to  a  patriotic 
Englishman;  but  it  is  very  pa- 
triotic. It  is  the  truth  and  noth- 
ing but  the  truth  which  I  have  but  touched 
on  in  the  last  chapter.  Several  times,  and 
especially  at  the  beginning  of  this  war,  we 
narrowly  escaped  ruin  because  we  neglected 
that  truth,  and  would  insist  on  treating  our 
crimes  of  the  '98  and  after  as  very  distant; 
while  in  Irish  feeling,  and  in  fact,  they  are 
very  near.  Repentance  of  this  remote  sort 
is  not  at  all  appropriate  to  the  case,  and  will 
not  do.  It  may  be  a  good  thing  to  forget  and 
forgive ;  but  it  is  altogether  too  easy  a  trick 
to  forget  and  be  forgiven. 

The  truth  about  Ireland  is  simply  this: 
that  the  relations  between  England  and  Ire- 
land are  the  relations  between  two  men  who 
have  to  travel  together,  one  of  whom  tried  to 
stab  the  other  at  the  last  stopping-place  or 
to  poison  the  other  at  the  last  inn.  Conversa- 
tion may  be  courteous,  but  it  will  be  occa- 

77 


78  The  Crimes  of  England 

sionally  forced.  The  topic  of  attempted 
murder,  its  examples  in  history  and  fiction, 
may  be  tactfully  avoided  in  the  sallies;  but  it 
will  be  occasionally  present  in  the  thoughts. 
Silences,  not  devoid  of  strain,  will  fall  from 
time  to  time.  The  partially  murdered  per- 
son may  even  think  an  assault  unlikely  to 
recur ;  but  it  is  asking  too  much,  perhaps,  to 
expect  him  to  find  it  impossible  to  imagine. 
And  even  if,  as  God  grant,  the  predominant 
partner  is  really  sorry  for  his  former  man- 
ner of  predominating,  and  proves  it  in  some 
unmistakable  manner — as  by  saving  the 
other  from  robbers  at  great  personal  risk — 
the  victim  may  still  be  unable  to  repress  an 
abstract  psychological  wonder  about  when 
his  companion  first  began  to  feel  like  that. 
Now  this  is  not  in  the  least  an  exaggerated 
parable  of  the  position  of  England  towards 
Ireland,  not  only  in  '98,  but  far  back  from 
the  treason  that  broke  the  Treaty  of  Lim- 
erick and  far  onwards  through  the  Great 
Famine  and  after.  The  conduct  of  the 
English  towards  the  Irish  after  the  Rebel- 
lion was  quite  simply  the  conduct  of  one  man 
who  traps  and  binds  another,  and  then  calmly 
cuts  him  about  with  a  knife.    The  conduct 


The  Lost  England  79 

during  the  Famine  was  quite  simply  the  con- 
duct of  the  first  man  if  he  entertained  the 
later  moments  of  the  second  man,  by  remark- 
ing in  a  chatty  manner  on  the  very  hopeful 
chances  of  his  bleeding  to  death.    The  Brit- 
ish Prime  Minister  publicly  refused  to  stop 
the  Famine  by  the  use  of  English  ships.    The 
British  Prime  Minister  positively  spread  the 
Famine,  by  making  the  half -starved  popula- 
tions of  Ireland  pay  for  the  starved  ones. 
The  common  verdict  of  a  coroner's  jury  upon 
some  emaciated  wretch  was  "Wilful  murder 
by  Lord  John  Russell" :  and  that  verdict  was 
not  only  the  verdict  of  Irish  public  opinion, 
but  is  the  verdict  of  history.    But  there  were 
those  in  influential  positions  in  England  who 
were  not  content  with  publicly  approving  the 
act,  but  publicly  proclaimed  the  motive.    The 
Times,  which  had  then  a  national  authority 
and  respectability  which  gave  its  words  a 
weight    unknown    in    modern    journalism, 
openly  exulted  in  the  prospect  of  a  Golden 
Age  when  the  kind  of  Irishman  native  to 
Ireland  would  be  "as  rare  on  the  banks  of  the 
Liifey  as  a  red  man  on  the  banks  of  the  Man- 
hattan."    It  seems  sufficiently  frantic  that 
such  a  thing  should  have  been  said  by  one 


80  The  Crimes  of  England 

European  of  another,  or  even  of  a  Red  In- 
dian, if  Red  Indians  had  occupied  anything- 
like  the  place  of  the  Irish  then  and  since;  if 
there  were  to  be  a  Red  Indian  Lord  Chief 
Justice  and  a  Red  Indian  Commander-in- 
Chief,  if  the  Red  Indian  Party  in  Congress, 
containing  first-rate  orators  and  fashionable 
novelists,  could  have  turned  Presidents  in 
and  out ;  if  half  the  best  troops  of  the  country 
were  trained  with  the  tomahawk  and  half 
the  best  journalism  of  the  capital  written  in 
picture-writing,  if  later,  by  general  consent, 
the  Chief  known  as  Pine  in  the  Twilight, 
was  the  best  living  poet,  or  the  Chief  Thin 
Red  Fox,  the  ablest  living  dramatist.  If  that 
were  realised,  the  English  critic  probably 
would  not  say  anything  scornful  of  red  men; 
or  certainly  would  be  sorry  he  said  it.  But 
the  extraordinary  avowal  does  mark  what 
was  most  peculiar  in  the  position.  This  has 
not  been  the  common  case  of  misgovernment. 
It  is  not  merely  that  the  institutions  we  set 
up  were  indefensible;  though  the  curious 
mark  of  them  is  that  they  were  literally  in- 
defensible; from  Wood's  Halfpence  to  the 
Irish  Church  Establishment.  There  can  be 
no  more  excuse  for  the  method  used  by  Pitt 


The  Lost  England  81 

than  for  the  method  used  by  Pigott.  But  it 
differs  further  from  ordinary  misrule  in  the 
vital  matter  of  its  object.  The  coercion  was 
not  imposed  that  the  people  might  live 
quietly,  but  that  the  people  might  die  quietly. 
And  then  we  sit  in  an  owlish  innocence  of 
our  sin,  and  debate  whether  the  Irish  might 
conceivably  succeed  in  saving  Ireland.  We, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  have  not  even  failed  to 
save  Ireland.  We  have  simply  failed  to  de- 
stroy her. 

It  is  not  possible  to  reverse  this  judgment 
or  to  take  away  a  single  count  from  it.  Is 
there,  then,  anything  whatever  to  be  said  for 
the  English  in  the  matter  ?  There  is :  though 
the  English  never  by  any  chance  say  it.  Nor 
do  the  Irish  say  it;  though  it  is  in  a  sense  a 
weakness  as  well  as  a  defence.  One  would 
think  the  Irish  had  reason  to  say  anything 
that  can  be  said  against  the  English  ruling 
class,  but  they  have  not  said,  indeed  they 
have  hardly  discovered,  one  quite  simple  fact 
— that  it  rules  England.  They  are  right  in 
asking  that  the  Irish  should  have  a  say  in  the 
Irish  government,  but  they  are  quite  wrong 
in  supposing  that  the  English  have  any  par- 
ticular say  in  English  government.     And  I 


82  The  Crimes  of  England 

seriously  believe  I  am  not  deceived  by  any 
national  bias,  when  I  say  that  the  common 
Englishman  would  be  quite  incapable  of  the 
cruelties  that  were  committed  in  his  name. 
But,  most  important  of  all,  it  is  the  histori- 
cal fact  that  there  was  another  England,  an 
England  consisting  of  common  Englishmen, 
which  not  only  certainly  would  have  done 
better,  but  actually  did  make  some  consid- 
erable attempt  to  do  better.  If  anyone  asks 
for  the  evidence,  the  answer  is  that  the  evi- 
dence has  been  destroyed,  or  at  least  delib- 
erately boycotted:  but  can  be  found  in  the 
unfashionable  corners  of  literature;  and, 
when  found,  is  final.  If  anyone  asks  for  the 
great  men  of  such  a  potential  democratic 
England,  the  answer  is  that  the  great  men 
are  labelled  small  men,  or  not  labelled  at  all ; 
have  been  successfully  belittled  as  the  eman- 
cipation of  which  they  dreamed  has  dwin- 
dled. The  greatest  of  them  is  now  little  more 
than  a  name;  he  is  criticised  to  be  under- 
rated and  not  to  be  understood ;  but  he  pre- 
sented all  that  alternative  and  more  liberal 
Englishry ;  and  was  enormously  popular  be- 
cause he  presented  it.  In  taking  him  as  the 
type  of  it  we  may  tell  most  shortly  the  whole 


The  Lost  England  88 

of  this  forgotten  tale.  And,  even  when  I 
begin  to  tell  it,  I  find  myself  in  the  presence 
of  that  ubiquitous  evil  which  is  the  subject 
of  this  book.  It  is  a  fact,  and  I  think  it  is  not 
a  coincidence,  that  in  standing  for  a  moment 
where  this  Englishman  stood,  I  again  find 
myself  confronted  by  the  German  soldier. 

The  son  of  a  small  Surrey  farmer,  a  re- 
spectable Tory  and  churchman,  ventured  to 
plead  against  certain  extraordinary  cruelties 
being  inflicted  on  Englishmen  whose  hands 
were  tied,  by  the  whips  of  German  superiors ; 
who  were  then  parading  in  English  fields 
their  stiff  foreign  uniforms  and  their  san- 
guinary foreign  discipline.  In  the  countries 
from  which  they  came,  of  course,  such  tor- 
ments were  the  one  monotonous  means  of 
driving  men  on  to  perish  in  the  dead  dynas- 
tic quarrels  of  the  north;  but  to  poor  Will 
Cobbett,  in  his  provincial  island,  knowing 
little  but  the  low  hills  and  hedges  around  the 
little  church  where  he  now  lies  buried,  the 
incident  seemed  odd — nay,  unpleasing.  He 
knew,  of  course,  that  there  was  then  flogging 
in  the  British  army  also;  but  the  German 
standard  was  notoriously  severe  in  such 
things,  and  was  something  of  an  acquired 


84  The  Crimes  of  England 

taste.  Added  to  which  he  had  all  sorts  of 
old  grandmotherly  prejudices  about  English- 
men being  punished  by  Englishmen,  and  no- 
tions of  that  sort.  He  protested,  not  only 
in  speech,  but  actually  in  print.  He  was  soon 
made  to  learn  the  perils  of  meddling  in  the 
high  politics  of  the  High  Dutch  militarists. 
The  fine  feelings  of  the  foreign  mercenaries 
were  soothed  by  Cobbett  being  flung  into 
Newgate  for  two  years  and  beggared  by  a 
fine  of  £1000.  That  small  incident  is  a  small 
transparent  picture  of  the  Holy  Alliance;  of 
what  was  really  meant  by  a  country,  once 
half  liberalised,  taking  up  the  cause  of  the 
foreign  kings.  This,  and  not  "The  Meeting 
of  Wellington  and  Blucher,"  should  be  en- 
graved as  the  great  scene  of  the  war.  From 
this  intemperate  Fenians  should  learn  that 
the  Teutonic  mercenaries  did  not  confine 
themselves  solely  to  torturing  Irishmen. 
They  were  equally  ready  to  torture  English- 
men: for  mercenaries  are  mostly  unpreju- 
diced. To  Cobbett's  eye  we  were  suffering 
from  allies  exactly  as  we  should  suffer  from 
invaders.  Boney  was  a  bogey ;  but  the  Ger- 
man was  a  nightmare,  a  thing  actually  sitting 
on  top  of  us.    In  Ireland  the  Alliance  meant 


The  Lost  England  85 

the  ruin  of  anything  and  everything  Irish, 
from  the  creed  of  St.  Patrick  to  the  mere 
colour  green.  But  in  England  also  it  meant 
the  ruin  of  anything  and  everything  Eng- 
lish, from  the  Habeas  Corpus  Act  to  Cob- 
bett. 

After  this  affair  of  the  scourging,  he 
wielded  his  pen  like  a  scourge  until  he  died. 
This  terrible  pamphleteer  was  one  of  those 
men  who  exist  to  prove  the  distinction  be- 
tween a  biography  and  a  life.  From  his 
biographies  you  will  learn  that  he  was  a 
Radical  who  had  once  been  a  Tory.  From 
his  life,  if  there  were  one,  you  would  learn 
that  he  was  always  a  Radical  because  he  was 
always  a  Tory.  Few  men  changed  less;  it 
was  round  him  that  the  politicians  like  Pitt 
chopped  and  changed,  like  fakirs  dancing 
round  a  sacred  rock.  His  secret  is  buried 
with  him ;  it  is  that  he  really  cared  about  the 
English  people.  He  was  conservative  be- 
cause he  cared  for  their  past,  and  liberal  be- 
cause he  cared  for  their  future.  But  he  was 
much  more  than  this.  He  had  two  forms  of 
moral  manhood  very  rare  in  our  time:  he 
was  ready  to  uproot  ancient  successes,  and 
he  was  ready  to  defy  oncoming  doom.  Burke 


86  The  Crimes  of  England 

said  that  few  are  the  partisans  of  a  tyranny 
that  has  departed :  he  might  have  added  that 
fewer  still  are  the  critics  of  a  tyranny  that 
has  remained.  Burke  certainly  was  not  one 
of  them.  While  lashing  himself  into  a 
lunacy  against  the  French  Revolution,  which 
only  very  incidentally  destroyed  the  property 
of  the  rich,  he  never  criticised  (to  do  him 
justice,  perhaps  never  saw)  the  English 
Revolution,  which  began  with  the  sack  of 
convents,  and  ended  with  the  fencing  in  of 
enclosures;  a  revolution  which  sweepingly 
and  systematically  destroyed  the  property  of 
the  poor.  While  rhetorically  putting  the 
Englishman  in  a  castle,  politically  he  would 
not  allow  him  on  a  common.  Cobbett,  a  much 
more  historical  thinker,  saw  the  beginning 
of  Capitalism  in  the  Tudor  pillage  and  de- 
plored it;  he  saw  the  triumph  of  Capitalism 
in  the  industrial  cities  and  defied  it.  The 
paradox  he  was  maintaining  really  amounted 
to  the  assertion  that  Westminster  Abbey  is 
rather  more  national  than  Welbeck  Abbey. 
The  same  paradox  would  have  led  him  to 
maintain  that  a  Warwickshire  man  had  more 
reason  to  be  proud  of  Stratford-on-Avon 
than  of  Birmingham.     He  would  no  more 


TUe  Lost  England  87 

have  thought  of  looking  for  England  in 
Birmingham  than  of  looking  for  Ireland  in 
Belfast. 

The  prestige  of  Cobbett's  excellent  literary- 
style  has  survived  the  persecution  of  his 
equally  excellent  opinions.  But  that  style 
also  is  underrated  through  the  loss  of  the 
real  English  tradition.  More  cautious 
schools  have  missed  the  fact  that  the  very 
genius  of  the  English  tongue  tends  not  only 
to  vigour,  but  specially  to  violence.  The 
Englishman  of  the  leading  articles  is  calm, 
moderate,  and  restrained ;  but  then  the  Eng- 
lishman of  the  leading  articles  is  a  Prussian. 
The  mere  English  consonants  are  full  of 
Cobbett.  Dr.  Johnson  was  our  great  man  of 
letters  when  he  said  "stinks,"  not  when  he 
said  "putrefaction."  Take  some  common 
phrase  like  "raining  cats  and  dogs,"  and  note 
not  only  the  extravagance  of  imagery 
(though  that  is  very  Shakespearean),  but 
a  jagged  energy  in  the  very  spelling.  Say 
"chats"  and  "chiens"  and  it  is  not  the  same. 
Perhaps  the  old  national  genius  has  survived 
the  urban  enslavement  most  spiritedly  in  our 
comic  songs,  admired  by  all  men  of  travel 
and   continental    culture,    by    Mr.    George 


88  The  Crimes  of  England 

Moore  as  by  Mr.  Belloc.  One  (to  which  I 
am  much  attached)  had  a  chorus — 

"O  wind  from  the  South 
Blow  mud  in  the  mouth 
Of  Jane,  Jane,  Jane." 

Note,  again,  not  only  the  tremendous  vision 
of  clinging  soils  carried  skywards  in  the  tor- 
nado, but  also  the  suitability  of  the  mere 
sounds.  Say  "boue"  and  "bouche"  for  mud 
and  mouth  and  it  is  not  the  same.  Cobbett 
was  a  wind  from  the  South;  and  if  he  occa- 
sionally seemed  to  stop  his  enemies'  mouths 
with  mud,  it  was  the  real  soil  of  South  Eng- 
land. 

And  as  his  seemingly  mad  language  Is 
very  literary,  so  his  seemingly  mad  meaning 
is  very  historical.  Modern  people  do  not 
understand  him  because  they  do  not  under- 
stand the  difference  between  exaggerating 
a  truth  and  exaggerating  a  lie.  He  did  ex- 
aggerate, but  what  he  knew,  not  what  he  did 
not  know.  He  only  appears  paradoxical  be- 
cause he  upheld  tradition  against  fashion.  A 
paradox  is  a  fantastic  thing  that  is  said  once : 
a  fashion  is  a  more  fantastic  thing  that  is 


The  Lost  England  89 

said  a  sufficient  number  of  times.  I  could 
give  numberless  examples  in  Cobbett's  case, 
but  I  will  give  only  one.  Anyone  who  finds 
himself  full  in  the  central  path  of  Cobbett's 
fury  sometimes  has  something  like  a  physical 
shock.  No  one  who  has  read  ''The  History 
of  the  Reformation"  will  ever  forget  the 
passage  (I  forget  the  precise  words)  in 
which  he  says  the  mere  thought  of  such  a 
person  as  Cranmer  makes  the  brain  reel,  and, 
for  an  instant,  doubt  the  goodness  of  God; 
but  that  peace  and  faith  flow  back  into  the 
soul  when  we  remember  that  he  was  burned 
alive.  Now  this  is  extravagant.  It  takes 
the  breath  away ;  and  it  was  meant  to.  But 
what  I  wish  to  point  out  is  that  a  much  more 
extravagant  view  of  Cranmer  was,  in  Cob- 
bett's day,  the  accepted  view  of  Cranmer; 
not  as  a  momentary  image,  but  as  an  im- 
movable historical  monument.  Thousands 
of  parsons  and  penmen  dutifully  set  down 
Cranmer  among  the  saints  and  martyrs ;  and 
there  are  many  respectable  people  who  would 
do  so  still.  This  is  not  an  exaggerated  truth, 
but  an  established  lie.  Cranmer  was  not 
such  a  monstrosity  of  meanness  as  Cobbett 
implies ;  but  he  was  mean.    But  there  is  no 


90  The  Crimes  of  England 

question  of  his  being  less  saintly  than  the 
parsonages  believed;  he  was  not  a  saint  at 
all ;  and  not  very  attractive  even  as  a  sinner. 
He  was  no  more  a  martyr  for  being  burned 
than  Crippen  for  being  hanged. 

Cobbett  was  defeated  because  the  English 
people  was  defeated.  After  the  frame-break- 
ing riots,  men,  as  men,  were  beaten:  and 
machines,  as  machines,  had  beaten  them. 
Peterloo  was  as  much  the  defeat  of  the  Eng- 
lish as  Waterloo  was  the  defeat  of  the 
French.  Ireland  did  not  get  Home  Rule 
because  England  did  not  get  it.  Cobbett 
would  not  forcibly  incorporate  Ireland,  least 
of  all  the  corpse  of  Ireland.  But  before  his 
defeat  Cobbett  had  an  enormous  following; 
his  ^'Register"  was  what  the  serial  novels  of 
Dickens  were  afterwards  to  be.  Dickens, 
by  the  way,  inherited  the  same  instinct  for 
abrupt  diction,  and  probably  enjoyed  writing 
"gas  and  gaiters"  more  than  any  two  other 
words  in  his  works.  But  Dickens  was  nar- 
rower than  Cobbett,  not  by  any  fault  of  his 
own,  but  because  in  the  intervening  epoch  of 
the  triumph  of  Scrooge  and  Gradgrind  the 
link  with  our  Christian  past  had  been  lost, 


The  Lost  England  91 


save  in  the  single  matter  of  Christmas,  which 
Dickens    rescued    romantically    and    by    a 
hair's-breadth  escape.    Cobbett  was  a  yeo- 
man ;  that  is,  a  man  free  and  farming  a  small 
estate.    By  Dickens's  time,  yeomen  seemed 
as   antiquated   as   bowmen.     Cobbett   was 
mediaeval;  that  is,  he  was  in  almost  every 
way  the  opposite  of  what  that  word  means 
to-day.  He  was  as  egalitarian  as  St.  Francis, 
and  as  independent  as  Robin  Hood.     Like 
that  other  yeoman  in  the  ballad,  he  bore  in 
hand  a  mighty  bow ;  what  some  of  his  ene- 
mies would  have  called  a  long  bow.     But 
though  he  sometimes  overshot  the  mark  of 
truth,   he  never   shot   away   from   it,   like 
Froude.    His  account  of  that  sixteenth  cen- 
tury in  which  the  mediaeval  civilisation  ended, 
is  not  more  and  not  less  picturesque  than 
Froude's :  the  difference  is  in  the  dull  detail 
of  truth.    That  crisis  was  not  the  foundling 
of  a  strong  Tudor  monarchy,  for  the  mon- 
archy almost  immediately  perished;  it  was 
the  founding  of  a  strong  class  holding  all 
the  capital  and  land,  for  it  holds  them  to  this 
day.    Cobbett  would  have  asked  nothing  bet- 
ter than  to  bend  his  mediaeval  bow  to  the 
cry  of  "St.  George  for  Merry  England,"  for 


92  The  Crimes  of  England 

though  he  pointed  to  the  other  and  uglier 
side  of  the  Waterloo  medal,  he  was  patriotic ; 
and  his  premonitions  were  rather  against 
Blucher  than  Wellington.  But  if  we  take 
that  old  war-cry  as  his  final  word  (and  he 
would  have  accepted  it)  we  must  note  how 
every  term  in  it  points  away  from  what  the 
modern  plutocrats  call  either  progress  or 
empire.  It  involves  the  invocation  of  saints, 
the  most  popular  and  the  most  forbidden 
form  of  mediaevalism.  The  modern  Imperi- 
alist no  more  thinks  of  St.  George  in  Eng- 
land than  he  thinks  of  St.  John  in  St.  John's 
Wood.  It  is  nationalist  in  the  narrowest 
sense ;  and  no  one  knows  the  beauty  and  sim- 
plicity of  the  Middle  Ages  who  has  not  seen 
St.  George's  Cross  separate,  as  it  was  at 
Cregy  or  Flodden,  and  noticed  how  much 
finer  a  flag  it  is  than  the  Union  Jack.  And 
the  word  "merry"  bears  witness  to  an  Eng- 
land famous  for  its  music  and  dancing  be- 
fore the  coming  of  the  Puritans,  the  last 
traces  of  which  have  been  stamped  out  by  a 
social  discipline  utterly  un-English.  Not 
for  two  years,  but  for  ten  decades  Cobbett 
has  been  in  prison ;  and  his  enemy,  the  "effi- 
cient" foreigner,  has  walked  about  in  the 


The  Lost  England  93 

sunlight,  magnificent,  and  a  model  for  men. 
I  do  not  think  that  even  the  Prussians  ever 
boasted  about  "Merry  Prussia." 


VI — Hamlet  and  the  Danes 


IN  the  one  classic  and  perfect  literary- 
product  that  ever  came  out  of  Ger- 
many— I  do  not  mean  **Faust,"  but 
Grimm's  Fairy  Tales — there  is  a 
gorgeous  story  about  a  boy  who  went 
through  a  number  of  experiences  without 
learning  how  to  shudder.  In  one  of  them,  I 
remember,  he  was  sitting  by  the  fireside  and 
a  pair  of  live  legs  fell  down  the  chimney  and 
walked  about  the  room  by  themselves.  After- 
wards the  rest  fell  down  and  joined  up ;  but 
this  was  almost  an  anti-climax.  Now  that  is 
very  charming,  and  full  of  the  best  German 
domesticity.  It  suggests  truly  what  wild 
adventures  the  traveller  can  find  by  stopping 
at  home.  But  it  also  illustrates  in  various 
ways  how  that  great  German  influence  on 
England,  which  is  the  matter  of  these  essays, 
began  in  good  things  and  gradually  turned 
to  bad.  It  began  as  a  literary  influence,  in 
the  lurid  tales  of  Hoffmann,  the  tale  of  ''Sin- 
tram,"  and  so  on;  the  revisualising  of  the 
dark  background  of  forest  behind  our  Euro- 

95 


96  The  Crimes  of  England 

pean  cities.  That  old  German  darkness  was 
immeasurably  livelier  than  the  new  German 
light.  The  devils  of  Germany  were  much 
better  than  the  angels.  Look  at  the  Teutonic 
pictures  of  "The  Three  Huntsmen"  and  ob- 
serve that  while  the  wicked  huntsman  is  ef- 
fective in  his  own  way,  the  good  huntsman  is 
weak  in  every  way,  a  sort  of  sexless  woman 
with  a  face  like  a  teaspoon.  But  there  is 
more  in  these  first  forest  tales,  these  homely 
horrors.  In  the  earlier  stages  they  have 
exactly  this  salt  of  salvation,  that  the  boy 
does  not  shudder.  They  are  made  fearful 
that  he  may  be  fearless,  not  that  he  may  fear. 
As  long  as  that  limit  is  kept,  the  barbaric 
dreamland  is  decent ;  and  though  individuals 
like  Coleridge  and  De  Quincey  mixed  it 
with  worse  things  (such  as  opium),  they 
kept  that  romantic  rudiment  upon  the  whole. 
But  the  one  disadvantage  of  a  forest  is  that 
one  may  lose  one's  way  in  it.  And  the  one 
danger  is  not  that  we  may  meet  devils,  but 
that  we  may  worship  them.  In  other  words, 
the  danger  is  one  always  associated,  by  the 
instinct  of  folk-lore,  with  forests;  it  is  en- 
chantment,  or  the  fixed  loss  of  oneself  in 
some  unnatural  captivity  or  spiritual  servi- 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  97 

tude.  And  in  the  evolution  of  Germanism, 
from  Hoffmann  to  Hauptmann,  we  do  see 
this  growing  tendency  to  take  horror  seri- 
ously, which  is  diabolism.  The  German  be- 
gins to  have  an  eerie  abstract  sympathy  with 
the  force  and  fear  he  describes,  as  distinct 
from  their  objective.  The  German  is  no  lon- 
ger sympathising  with  the  boy  against  the 
goblin,  but  rather  with  the  goblin  against  the 
boy.  There  goes  with  it,  as  always  goes  with 
idolatry,  a  dehumanised  seriousness ;  the  men 
of  the  forest  are  already  building  upon  a 
mountain  the  empty  throne  of  the  Super- 
man. Now  it  is  just  at  this  point  that  I  for 
one,  and  most  men  who  love  truth  as  well  as 
tales,  begin  to  lose  interest.  I  am  all  for 
"going  out  into  the  world  to  seek  my  for- 
tune," but  I  do  not  want  to  find  it — and  find 
it  is  only  being  chained  for  ever  among  the 
frozen  figures  of  the  Sieges  Alices.  I  do  not 
want  to  be  an  idolater,  still  less  an  idol.  I 
am  all  for  going  to  fairyland,  but  I  am  also 
all  for  coming  back.  That  is,  I  will  admire, 
but  I  will  not  be  magnetised,  either  by  mysti- 
cism or  militarism.  I  am  all  for  German 
fantasy,  but  I  will  resist  German  earnestness 
till  I  die.    I  am  all  for  Grimm's  Fairy  Tales ; 


98  The  Crimes  of  England 

but  if  there  is  such  a  thing  as  Grimm's  Law, 
I  would  break  it,  if  I  knew  what  it  was.  I 
like  the  Prussian's  legs  (in  their  beautiful 
boots)  to  fall  down  the  chimney  and  walk 
about  my  room.  But  when  he  procures  a 
head  and  begins  to  talk,  I  feel  a  little  bored. 
The  Germans  cannot  really  be  deep  be- 
cause they  will  not  consent  to  be  superficial. 
They  are  bewitched  by  art,  and  stare  at  it, 
and  cannot  see  round  it.  They  will  not  be- 
lieve that  art  is  a  light  and  slight  thing — a 
feather,  even  if  it  be  from  an  angelic  wing. 
Only  the  slime  is  at  the  bottom  of  a  pool ;  the 
sky  is  on  the  surface.  We  see  this  in  that 
very  typical  process,  the  Germanising  of 
Shakespeare.  I  do  not  complain  of  the  Ger- 
mans forgetting  that  Shakespeare  was  an 
Englishman.  I  complain  of  their  forgetting 
that  Shakespeare  was  a  man;  that  he  had 
moods,  that  he  made  mistakes,  and,  above 
all,  that  he  knew  his  art  was  an  art  and  not 
an  attribute  of  deity.  That  is  what  is  the 
matter  with  the  Germans ;  they  cannot  "ring 
fancy's  knell";  their  knells  have  no  gaiety. 
The  phrase  of  Hamlet  about  "holding  the 
mirror  up  to  nature"  is  always  quoted  by 
such  earnest  critics  as  meaning  that  art  is 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  99 

nothing  if  not  realistic.  But  it  really  means 
(or  at  least  its  author  really  thought)  that 
art  is  nothing  if  not  artificial.  Realists,  like 
other  barbarians,  really  believe  the  mirror; 
and  therefore  break  the  mirror.  Also  they 
leave  out  the  phrase  "as  'twere,"  which  must 
be  read  into  every  remark  of  Shakespeare, 
and  especially  every  remark  of  Hamlet. 
What  I  mean  by  believing  the  mirror,  and 
breaking  it,  can  be  recorded  in  one  case  I  re- 
member; in  which  a  realistic  critic  quoted 
German  authorities  to  prove  that  Hamlet  had 
a  particular  psycho-pathological  abnor- 
mality, which  is  admittedly  nowhere  men- 
tioned in  the  play.  The  critic  was  bewitched ; 
he  was  thinking  of  Hamlet  as  a  real  man, 
with  a  background  behind  him  three  dimen- 
sions deep — which  does  not  exist  in  a  look- 
ing-glass. "The  best  in  this  kind  are  but 
shadows."  No  German  commentator  has 
ever  made  an  adequate  note  on  that.  Never- 
theless, Shakespeare  was  an  Englishman; 
he  was  nowhere  more  English  than  in  his 
blunders ;  but  he  was  nowhere  more  success- 
ful than  in  the  description  of  very  English 
types  of  character.  And  if  anything  is  to 
be  said  about  Hamlet,  beyond  what  Shake- 


100  The  Crimes  of  England 

speare  has  said  about  him,  I  should  say  that 
Hamlet  was  an  Englishman  too.  He  was  as 
much  an  Englishman  as  he  was  a  gentleman, 
and  he  had  the  very  grave  weaknesses  of 
both  characters.  The  chief  English  fault, 
especially  in  the  nineteenth  century,  has  been 
lack  of  decision,  not  only  lack  of  decision  in 
action,  but  lack  of  the  equally  essential  de- 
cision in  thought — which  some  call  dogma. 
And  in  the  politics  of  the  last  century,  this 
English  Hamlet,  as  we  shall  see,  played  a 
great  part,  or  rather  refused  to  play  it. 

There  were,  then,  two  elements  in  the  Ger- 
man influence;  a  sort  of  pretty  playing  with 
terror  and  a  solemn  recognition  of  terrorism. 
The  first  pointed  to  elfland,  and  the  second  to 
— shall  we  say,  Prussia.  And  by  that  uncon- 
scious symbolism  with  which  all  this  story 
develops,  it  was  soon  to  be  dramatically 
tested,  by  a  definite  political  query,  whether 
what  we  really  respected  was  the  Teutonic 
fantasy  or  the  Teutonic  fear. 

The  Germanisation  of  England,  its  tran- 
sition and  turning-point,  was  well  typified  by 
the  genius  of  Carlyle.  The  original  charm 
of  Germany  had  been  the  charm  of  the  child. 
The  Teutons  were  never  so  great  as  when 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  101 

they  were  childish ;  in  their  religious  art  and 
popular  imagery  the  Christ-Child  is  really  a 
child,  though  the  Christ  is  hardly  a  man. 
The  self-conscious  fuss  of  their  pedagogy  is 
half -redeemed  by  the  unconscious  grace 
which  called  a  school  not  a  seed-plot  of  citi- 
zens, but  merely  a  garden  of  children.  All 
the  first  and  best  forest-spirit  is  infancy,  its 
wonder,  its  wilfulness,  even  its  still  innocent 
fear.  Carlyle  marks  exactly  the  moment 
when  the  German  child  becomes  the  spoilt 
child.  The  wonder  turns  to  mere  mysticism ; 
and  mere  mysticism  always  turns  to  mere 
immoralism.  The  wilfulness  is  no  longer 
liked,  but  is  actually  obeyed.  The  fear  be- 
comes a  philosophy.  Panic  hardens  into 
pessimism ;  or  else,  what  is  often  equally  de- 
pressing, optimism. 

Carlyle,  the  most  influential  English  writer 
of  that  time,  marks  all  this  by  the  mental 
interval  between  his  "French  Revolution" 
and  his  "Frederick  the  Great."  In  both  he 
was  Germanic.  Carlyle  was  really  as  senti- 
mental as  Goethe ;  and  Goethe  was  really  as 
sentimental  as  Werther.  Carlyle  understood 
everything  about  the  French  Revolution,  ex- 
cept that  it  was  a  French  revolution.     He 


102  The  Crimes  of  England 

could  not  conceive  that  cold  anger  that  comes 
from  a  love  of  insulted  truth.  It  seemed  to 
him  absurd  that  a  man  should  die,  or  do 
murder,  for  the  First  Proposition  of  Euclid ; 
should  relish  an  egalitarian  state  like  an  equi- 
lateral triangle;  or  should  defend  the  Pons 
Asinorum  as  Codes  defended  the  Tiber 
bridge.  But  anyone  who  does  not  under- 
stand that  does  not  understand  the  French 
Revolution — nor,  for  that  matter,  the  Ameri- 
can Revolution.  "We  hold  these  truths  to 
be  self-evident":  it  was  the  fanaticism  of 
truism.  But  though  Carlyle  had  no  real  re- 
spect for  liberty,  he  had  a  real  reverence  for 
anarchy.  He  admired  elemental  energy. 
The  violence  which  repelled  most  men  from 
the  Revolution  was  the  one  thing  that  at- 
tracted him  to  it.  While  a  Whig  like  Macau- 
lay  respected  the  Girondists  but  deplored  the 
Mountain,  a  Tory  like  Carlyle  rather  liked 
the  Mountain  and  quite  unduly  despised  the 
Girondists.  This  appetite  for  formless  force 
belongs,  of  course,  to  the  forests,  to  Ger- 
many. But  when  Carlyle  got  there,  there 
fell  upon  him  a  sort  of  spell  which  is  his 
tragedy  and  the  English  tragedy,  and,  in  no 
small  degree,  the  German  tragedy  too.    The 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  103 

real  romance  of  the  Teutons  was  largely  a 
romance  of  the  Southern  Teutons,  with  their 
castles,  which  are  almost  literally  castles  in 
the  air,  and  their  river  which  is  walled  with 
vineyards  and  rhymes  so  naturally  to  wine. 
But  as  Carlyle's  was  rootedly  a  romance  of 
conquest,  he  had  to  prove  that  the  thing 
which  conquered  in  Germany  was  really 
more  poetical  than  anything  else  in  Germany. 
Now  the  thing  that  conquered  in  Germany 
was  about  the  most  prosaic  thing  of  which 
the  world  ever  grew  weary.  There  is  a 
great  deal  more  poetry  in  Brixton  than  in 
Berlin.  Stella  said  that  Swift  could  write 
charmingly  about  a  broom-stick;  and  poor 
Carlyle  had  to  write  romantically  about  a 
ramrod.  Compare  him  with  Heine,  who 
had  also  a  detached  taste  in  the  mystical 
grotesques  of  Germany,  but  who  saw  what 
was  their  enemy :  and  offered  to  nail  up  the 
Prussian  eagle  like  an  old  crow  as  a  target 
for  the  archers  of  the  Rhine.  Its  prosaic 
essence  is  not  proved  by  the  fact  that  it  did 
not  produce  poets:  it  is  proved  by  the  more 
deadly  fact  that  it  did.  The  actual  written 
poetry  of  Frederick  the  Great,  for  instance, 
was  not  even  German  or  barbaric,  but  sim- 


104  The  Crimes  of  England 


ply  feeble — and  French.  Thus  Carlyle  be- 
came continually  gloomier  as  his  fit  of  the 
blues  deepened  into  Prussian  blues ;  nor  can 
there  be  any  wonder.  His  philosophy  had 
brought  out  the  result  that  the  Prussian  was 
the  first  of  Germans,  and,  therefore,  the  first 
of  men.  No  wonder  he  looked  at  the  rest 
of  us  with  little  hope. 

But  a  stronger  test  was  coming  both  for 
Carlyle  and  England.  Prussia,  plodding, 
policing,  as  materialist  as  mud,  went  on 
solidifying  and  strengthening  after  uncon- 
quered  Russia  and  unconquered  England 
had  rescued  her  where  she  lay  prostrate  un- 
der Napoleon.  In  this  interval  the  two  most 
important  events  were  the  Polish  national 
revival,  with  which  Russia  was  half  inclined 
to  be  sympathetic,  but  Prussia  was  im- 
placably coercionist;  and  the  positive  re- 
fusal of  the  crown  of  a  united  Germany  by 
the  King  of  Prussia,  simply  because  it  was 
constitutionally  offered  by  a  free  German 
Convention.  Prussia  did  not  want  to  lead 
the  Germans :  she  wanted  to  conquer  the  Ger- 
mans. And  she  wanted  to  conquer  other 
people  first.  She  had  already  found  her  bru- 
tal, if  humorous,  embodiment  in  Bismarck; 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  105 

and  he  began  with  a  scheme  full  of  brutality 
and  not  without  humour.  He  took  up,  or 
rather  pretended  to  take  up,  the  claim  of 
the  Prince  of  Augustenberg  to  duchies  which 
were  a  quite  lawful  part  of  the  land  of  Den- 
mark. In  support  of  this  small  pretender  he 
enlisted  two  large  things,  the  Germanic 
body  called  the  Bund  and  the  Austrian  Em- 
pire. It  is  possibly  needless  to  say  that  after 
he  had  seized  the  disputed  provinces  by  pure 
Prussian  violence,  he  kicked  out  the  Prince 
of  Augustenberg,  kicked  out  the  German 
Bund,  and  finally  kicked  out  the  Austrian 
Empire  too,  in  the  sudden  campaign  of 
Sadowa.  He  was  a  good  husband  and  a 
good  father;  he  did  not  paint  in  water  col- 
ours ;  and  of  such  is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven. 
But  the  symbolic  intensity  of  the  incident 
was  this.  The  Danes  expected  protection 
from  England;  and  if  there  had  been  any 
sincerity  in  the  ideal  side  of  our  Teutonism 
they  ought  to  have  had  it.  They  ought  to 
have  had  it  even  by  the  pedantries  of  the 
time,  which  already  talked  of  Latin  inferior- 
ity:  and  were  never  weary  of  explaining  that 
the  country  of  Richelieu  could  not  rule  and 
the  country  of  Napoleon  could  not  fight. 


106  The  Crimes  of  England 

But  if  it  was  necessary  for  whosoever  would 
be  saved  to  be  a  Teuton,  the  Danes  were 
more  Teuton  than  the  Prussians.  If  it  be  a 
matter  of  vital  importance  to  be  descended 
from  Vikings,  the  Danes  really  were  de- 
scended from  Vikings,  while  the  Prussians 
were  descended  from  mongrel  Slavonic  sav- 
ages. If  Protestantism  be  progress,  the 
Danes  were  Protestant;  while  they  had  at- 
tained quite  peculiar  success  and  wealth  in 
that  small  ownership  and  intensive  cultiva- 
tion which  is  very  commonly  a  boast  of 
Catholic  lands.  They  had  in  a  quite  arresting 
degree  what  was  claimed  for  the  Germanics 
as  against  Latin  revolutionism:  quiet  free- 
dom, quiet  prosperity,  a  simple  love  of  fields 
and  of  the  sea.  But,  moreover,  by  that  co- 
incidence which  dogs  this  drama,  the  English 
of  that  Victorian  epoch  had  found  their 
freshest  impression  of  the  northern  spirit  of 
infancy  and  wonder  in  the  works  of  a  Dan- 
ish man  of  genius,  whose  stories  and  sketches 
were  so  popular  in  England  as  almost  to  have 
become  English.  Good  as  Grimm's  Fairy 
Tales  were,  they  had  been  collected  and  not 
created  by  the  modern  German ;  they  were  a 
museum  of  things  older  than  any  nation,  of 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  107 

the  dateless  age  of  once-upon-a-time.  When 
the  English  romantics  wanted  to  find  the 
folk-tale  spirit  still  alive,  they  found  it  in 
the  small  country  of  one  of  those  small  kings, 
with  whom  the  folk-tales  are  almost  comi- 
cally crowded.  There  they  found  what  we 
call  an  original  writer,  who  was  nevertheless 
the  image  of  the  origins.  They  found  a 
whole  fairyland  in  one  head  and  under  one 
nineteenth-century  top  hat.  Those  of  the 
English  who  were  then  children  owe  to 
Hans  Andersen  more  than  to  any  of  their 
own  writers,  that  essential  educational  emo- 
tion which  feels  that  domesticity  is  not  dull 
but  rather  fantastic ;  that  sense  of  the  fairy- 
land of  furniture,  and  the  travel  and  adven- 
ture of  the  farmyard.  His  treatment  of  in- 
animate things  as  animate  was  not  a  cold 
and  awkward  allegory:  it  was  a  true  sense 
of  a  dumb  divinity  in  things  that  are. 
Through  him  a  child  did  feel  that  the  chair 
he  sat  on  was  something  like  a  wooden  horse. 
Through  him  children  and  the  happier  kind 
of  men  did  feel  themselves  covered  by  a  roof 
as  by  the  folded  wings  of  some  vast  domes- 
tic fowl;  and  feel  common  doors  like  great 
mouths  that  opened  to  utter  welcome.     In 


108  The  Crimes  of  England 

the  story  of  ''The  Fir  Tree"  he  transplanted 
to  England  a  living  bush  that  can  still  blos- 
som into  candles.  And  in  his  tale  of  "The 
Tin  Soldier"  he  uttered  the  true  defence  of 
romantic  militarism  against  the  prigs  who 
would  forbid  it  even  as  a  toy  for  the  nursery. 
He  suggested,  in  the  true  tradition  of  the 
folk-tales,  that  the  dignity  of  the  fighter  is 
not  in  his  largeness  but  rather  in  his  small- 
ness,  in  his  stiff  loyalty  and  heroic  helpless- 
ness in  the  hands  of  larger  and  lower  things. 
These  things,  alas,  were  an  allegory.  When 
Prussia,  finding  her  crimes  unpunished,  af- 
terwards carried  them  into  France  as  well  as 
Denmark,  Carlyle  and  his  school  made  some 
effort  to  justify  their  Germanism,  by  pit- 
ting what  they  called  the  piety  and  simplicity 
of  Germany  against  what  they  called  the 
cynicism  and  ribaldry  of  France.  But  no- 
body could  possibly  pretend  that  Bismarck 
was  more  pious  and  simple  than  Hans  An- 
dersen; yet  the  Carlyleans  looked  on  with 
silence  or  approval  while  the  innocent  toy 
kingdom  was  broken  like  a  toy.  Here  again, 
it  is  enormously  probable  that  England 
would  have  struck  upon  the  right  side,  if  the 
English  people  had  been  the  English  Gov- 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  109 

ernment.  Among  other  coincidences,  the 
Danish  princess  who  had  married  the  Eng- 
lish heir  was  something  very  like  a  fairy 
princess  to  the  English  crowd.  The  national 
poet  had  hailed  her  as  a  daughter  of  the  sea- 
kings;  and  she  was,  and  indeed  still  is,  the 
most  popular  royal  figure  in  England.  But 
whatever  our  people  may  have  been  like,  our 
politicians  were  on  the  very  tamest  level  of 
timidity  and  the  fear  of  force  to  which  they 
have  ever  sunk.  The  Tin  Soldier  of  the 
Danish  army  and  the  paper  boat  of  the  Dan- 
ish navy,  as  in  the  story,  were  swept  away 
down  the  great  gutter,  down  that  colossal 
cloaca  that  leads  to  the  vast  cesspool  of  Ber- 
lin. 

Why,  as  a  fact,  did  not  England  inter- 
pose? There  were  a  great  many  reasons 
given,  but  I  think  they  were  all  various  in- 
ferences from  one  reason;  indirect  results 
and  sometimes  quite  illogical  results,  of 
what  we  have  called  the  Germanisation  of 
England.  First,  the  very  insularity  on  which 
we  insisted  was  barbaric,  in  its  refusal  of  a 
seat  in  the  central  senate  of  the  nations. 
What  we  called  our  splendid  isolation  be- 
came a  rather  ignominious  sleeping-partner- 


110          The  Crimes  of  England 

ship  with  Prussia.  Next,  we  were  largely 
trained  in  irresponsibility  by  our  contempo- 
rary historians,  Freeman  and  Green,  teach- 
ing us  to  be  proud  of  a  possible  descent  from 
King  Arthur's  nameless  enemies  and  not 
from  King  Arthur.  King  Arthur  might  not 
be  historical,  but  at  least  he  was  legendary. 
Hengist  and  Horsa  were  not  even  legendary, 
for  they  left  no  legend.  Anybody  could  see 
what  was  obligatory  on  the  representative 
of  Arthur;  he  was  bound  to  be  chivalrous, 
that  is,  to  be  European.  But  nobody  could 
imagine  what  was  obligatory  on  the  repre- 
sentative of  Horsa,  unless  it  were  to  be 
horsy.  That  was  perhaps  the  only  part  of 
the  Anglo-Saxon  programme  that  the  con- 
temporary English  really  carried  out.  Then, 
in  the  very  real  decline  from  Cobbett  to  Cob- 
den  (that  is,  from  a  broad  to  a  narrow  man- 
liness and  good  sense)  there  had  grown  up 
the  cult  of  a  very  curious  kind  of  peace,  to 
be  spread  all  over  the  world  not  by  pilgrims, 
but  by  pedlars.  Mystics  from  the  beginning 
had  made  vows  of  peace — ^but  they  added  to 
them  vows  of  poverty.  Vows  of  poverty 
were  not  in  the  Cobdenite's  line.  Then, 
again,  there  was  the  positive  praise  of  Prus- 


Hamlet  and  the  Danes  111 

sia,  to  which  steadily  worsening  case  the 
Carlyleans  were  already  committed.  But 
beyond  these,  there  was  something  else,  a 
spirit  which  had  more  infected  us  as  a  whole. 
That  spirit  was  the  spirit  of  Hamlet.  We 
gave  the  grand  name  of  "evolution"  to  a  no- 
tion that  things  do  themselves.  Our  wealth, 
our  insularity,  our  gradual  loss  of  faith,  had 
so  dazed  us  that  the  old  Christian  England 
haunted  us  like  a  ghost  in  whom  we  could 
not  quite  believe.  An  aristocrat  like  Palm- 
erston,  loving  freedom  and  hating  the  up- 
start despotism,  must  have  looked  on  at  its 
cold  brutality  not  without  that  ugly  ques- 
tion which  Hamlet  asked  himself — am  I  a 

coward  ? 

It  cannot  be 
But  I  am  pigeon-livered  and  lack  gall 
To  make  oppression  bitter ;  or  'ere  this 
I  should  have  fatted  all  the  region  kites 
With  this  slave's  offal. 

We  made  dumb  our  anger  and  our  honour; 
but  it  has  not  brought  us  peace. 


VII — The  Midnight  of  Europe 

AMONG  the  minor  crimes  of  Eng- 
land may  be  classed  the  shallow 
criticism  and  easy  abandonment 
of  Napoleon  III.  The  Victorian 
English  had  a  very  bad  habit  of  being  in- 
fluenced by  words  and  at  the  same  time  pre- 
tending to  despise  them.  They  would  build 
their  whole  historical  philosophy  upon  two 
or  three  titles,  and  then  refuse  to  get  even 
the  titles  right.  The  solid  Victorian  Eng- 
lishman, with  his  whiskers  and  his  Parlia- 
mentary vote,  was  quite  content  to  say  that 
Louis  Napoleon  and  William  of  Prussia  both 
became  Emperors — by  which  he  meant  auto- 
crats. His  whiskers  would  have  bristled 
with  rage  and  he  would  have  stormed  at  you 
for  hair-splitting  and  *'lingo,"  if  you  had 
answered  that  William  was  German  Em- 
peror, while  Napoleon  was  not  French  Em- 
peror, but  only  Emperor  of  the  French. 
What  could  such  mere  order  of  the  words 
matter  ?  Yet  the  same  Victorian  would  have 
been  even  more  indignant  if  he  had  been 

"3 


114  The  Crimes  of  England 


asked  to  be  satisfied  with  an  Art  Master, 
when  he  had  advertised  for  a  Master  of  Arts. 
His  irritation  would  have  increased  if  the 
Art  Master  had  promised  him  a  sea-piece 
and  had  brought  him  a  piece  of  the  sea ;  or  if, 
during  the  decoration  of  his  house,  the  same 
aesthetic  humourist  had  undertaken  to  pro- 
cure some  Indian  Red  and  had  produced  a 
Red  Indian. 

The  Englishman  would  not  see  that  if 
there  was  only  a  verbal  difference  between 
the  French  Emperor  and  the  Emperor  of  the 
French,  so,  if  it  came  to  that,  it  was  a  verbal 
difference  between  the  Emperor  and  the  Re- 
public, or  even  between  a  Parliament  and  no 
Parliament.  For  him  an  Emperor  meant 
merely  despotism;  he  had  not  yet  learned 
that  a  Parliament  may  mean  merely  oligar- 
chy. He  did  not  know  that  the  English 
people  would  soon  be  made  impotent,  not  by 
the  disfranchising  of  their  constituents,  but 
simply  by  the  silencing  of  their  members; 
and  that  the  governing  class  of  England  did 
not  now  depend  upon  rotten  boroughs,  but 
upon  rotten  representatives.  Therefore  he 
did  not  understand  Bonapartism.  He  did 
not  understand  that  French  democracy  be- 


The  MidMight  of  Europe         115 

came  more  democratic,  not  less,  when  it 
turned  all  France  into  one  constituency 
which  elected  one  member.  He  did  not  un- 
derstand that  many  dragged  down  the  Re- 
public because  it  was  not  republican,  but 
purely  senatorial.  He  was  yet  to  learn  how 
quite  corruptly  senatorial  a  great  represen- 
tative assembly  can  become.  Yet  in  Eng- 
land to-day  we  hear  "'the  decline  of  Parlia- 
ment" talked  about  and  taken  for  granted 
by  the  best  Parliamentarians — Mr.  Balfour, 
for  instance — and  we  hear  the  one  partly 
French  and  wholly  Jacobin  historian  of  the 
French  Revolution  recommending  for  the 
English  evil  a  revival  of  the  power  of  the 
Crown.  It  seems  that  so  far  from  having 
left  Louis  Napoleon  far  behind  in  the  grey 
dust  of  the  dead  despotisms,  it  is  not  at  all 
improbable  that  our  most  extreme  revolu- 
tionary developments  may  end  where  Louis 
Napoleon  began. 

In  other  words,  the  Victorian  Englishman 
did  not  understand  the  words  "Emperor  of 
the  French."  The  type  of  title  was  deliber- 
ately chosen  to  express  the  idea  of  an  elec- 
tive and  popular  origin;  as  against  such  a 
phrase  as  "the  German  Emperor,"  which  ex- 


116  The  Crimes  of  England 

presses  an  almost  transcendental  tribal  pa- 
triarchate, or  such  a  phrase  as  "King  of 
Prussia,"  which  suggests  personal  owner- 
ship of  a  whole  territory.  To  treat  the  Coup 
d'etat  as  unpardonable  is  to  justify  riot 
against  despotism,  but  forbid  any  riot 
against  aristocracy.  Yet  the  idea  expressed 
in  ''The  Emperor  of  the  French"  is  not  dead, 
but  rather  risen  from  the  dead.  It  is  the 
idea  that  while  a  government  may  pretend 
to  be  a  popular  government,  only  a  person 
can  be  really  popular.  Indeed,  the  idea  is 
still  the  crown  of  American  democracy,  as 
it  was  for  a  time  the  crown  of  French  de- 
mocracy. The  very  powerful  official  who 
makes  the  choice  of  that  great  people  for 
peace  or  war,  might  very  well  be  called,  not 
the  President  of  the  United  States,  but  the 
President  of  the  Americans.  In  Italy  we 
have  seen  the  King  and  the  mob  prevail  over 
the  conservatism  of  the  Parliament,  and  in 
Russia  the  new  popular  policy  sacramentally 
symbolised  by  the  Czar  riding  at  the  head  of 
the  new  armies.  But  in  one  place,  at  least, 
the  actual  form  of  words  exists;  and  the 
actual  form  of  words  has  been  splendidly 
justified.    One  man  among  the  sons  of  men 


The  Midnight  of  Europe         117 

has  been  permitted  to  fulfil  a  courtly  formula 
with  awful  and  disastrous  fidelity.  Political 
and  geographical  ruin  have  written  one  last 
royal  title  across  the  sky;  the  loss  of  palace 
and  capital  and  territory  have  but  isolated 
and  made  evident  the  people  that  has  not 
been  lost ;  not  laws  but  the  love  of  exiles,  not 
soil  but  the  souls  of  men,  still  make  certain 
that  five  true  words  shall  yet  be  written  in 
the  corrupt  and  fanciful  chronicles  of  man- 
kind:   "The  King  of  the  Belgians." 

It  is  a  common  phrase,  recurring  con- 
stantly in  the  real  if  rabid  eloquence  of  Vic- 
tor Hugo,  that  Napoleon  III.  was  a  mere  ape 
of  Napoleon  I.  That  is,  that  he  had,  as  the 
politician  says,  in  "L'Aiglon,"  *'le  petit  cha- 
peau,  mais  pas  la  tete";  that  he  was  merely 
a  bad  imitation.  This  is  extravagantly  ex- 
aggerative ;  and  those  who  say  it,  moreover, 
often  miss  the  two  or  three  points  of  re- 
semblance which  really  exist  in  the  exagger- 
ation. One  resemblance  there  certainly  was. 
In  both  Napoleons  it  has  been  suggested  that 
the  glory  was  not  so  great  as  it  seemed ;  but 
in  both  it  can  be  emphatically  added  that  the 
eclipse  was  not  so  great  as  it  seemed  either. 
Both  succeeded  at  first  and  failed  at  last. 


118         The  Crimes  of  England 

But  both  succeeded  at  last,  even  after  the 
failure.  If  at  this  moment  we  owe  thanks  to 
Napoleon  Bonaparte  for  the  armies  of 
united  France,  we  also  owe  some  thanks  to 
Louis  Bonaparte  for  the  armies  of  united 
Italy.  That  great  movement  to  a  freer  and 
more  chivalrous  Europe  which  we  call  to- 
day the  Cause  of  the  Allies,  had  its  forerun- 
ners and  first  victories  before  our  time;  and 
it  not  only  won  at  Areola,  but  also  at  Sol- 
ferino.  Men  who  remembered  Louis  Na- 
poleon when  he  mooned  about  the  Blessing- 
ton  salon,  and  was  supposed  to  be  almost 
mentally  deficient,  used  to  say  he  deceived 
Europe  twice ;  once  when  he  made  men  think 
him  an  imbecile,  and  once  when  he  made 
them  think  him  a  statesman.  But  he  de- 
ceived them  a  third  time;  when  he  made 
them  think  he  was  dead ;  and  had  done  noth- 
ing. 

In  spite  of  the  unbridled  verse  of  Hugo 
and  the  even  more  unbridled  prose  of  King- 
lake,  Napoleon  III.  is  really  and  solely  dis- 
credited in  history  because  of  the  catastro- 
phe of  1870.  Hugo  hurled  any  amount  of 
lightning  on  Louis  Napoleon ;  but  he  threw 
very  little  light  on  him.    Some  passages  in 


The  Midnnight  of  Europe         119 

the  "Chatiments"  are  really  caricatures 
carved  in  eternal  marble.  They  will  always 
be  valuable  in  reminding  generations  too 
vague  and  soft,  as  were  the  Victorians,  of 
the  great  truth  that  hatred  is  beautiful,  when 
it  is  hatred  of  the  ugliness  of  the  soul.  But 
most  of  them  could  have  been  written  about 
Haman,  or  Heliogabalus,  or  King  John,  or 
Queen  Elizabeth,  as  much  as  about  poor 
Louis  Napoleon;  they  bear  no  trace  of  any 
comprehension  of  his  quite  interesting  aims, 
and  his  quite  comprehensible  contempt  for 
the  fat-souled  senatorial  politicians.  And  if 
a  real  revolutionist  like  Hugo  did  not  do 
justice  to  the  revolutionary  element  in 
Caesarism,  it  need  hardly  be  said  that  a 
rather  Primrose  League  Tory  like  Tennyson 
did  not.  Kinglake's  curiously  acrid  insist- 
ence upon  the  Coup  d'etat  is,  I  fear,  only  an 
indulgence  in  one  of  the  least  pleasing  pleas- 
ures of  our  national  pen  and  press,  and  one 
which  afterwards  altogether  ran  away  with 
us  over  the  Dreyfus  case.  It  is  an  unfor- 
tunate habit  of  publicly  repenting  for  other 
people's  sins.  If  this  came  easy  to  an  Eng- 
lishman like  Kinglake,  it  came,  of  course, 
still  easier  to  a  German  like  Queen  Victoria's 


120  The  Crimes  of  England 

husband  and  even  to  Queen  Victoria  herself, 
who  was  naturally  influenced  by  him.  But 
in  so  far  as  the  sensible  masses  of  the  Eng- 
lish nation  took  any  interest  in  the  matter,  it 
is  probable  that  they  sympathised  with  Palm- 
erston,  who  was  as  popular  as  the  Prince 
Consort  was  unpopular.  The  black  mark 
against  Louis  Napoleon's  name  until  now, 
has  simply  been  Sedan ;  and  it  is  our  whole 
purpose  to-day  to  turn  Sedan  into  an  inter- 
lude. If  it  is  not  an  interlude,  it  will  be  the 
end  of  the  world.  But  we  have  sworn  to 
make  an  end  of  that  ending:  warring  on 
until,  if  only  by  a  purgatory  of  the  nations 
and  the  mountainous  annihilation  of  men, 
the  story  of  the  world  ends  well. 

There  are,  as  it  were,  valleys  of  history 
quite  close  to  us,  but  hidden  by  the  closer 
hills.  One,  as  we  have  seen,  is  that  fold 
in  the  soft  Surrey  hills  where  Cobbett  sleeps 
with  his  still-born  English  Revolution.  An- 
other is  under  that  height  called  The  Spy  of 
Italy,  where  a  new  Napoleon  brought  back 
the  golden  eagles  against  the  black  eagles  of 
Austria.  Yet  that  French  adventure  in  sup- 
port of  the  Italian  insurrection  was  very  im- 
portant; we  are  only  beginning  to  under- 


The  Midnight  of  Europe         121 

stand  its  importance.  It  was  a  defiance  to 
the  German  Reaction  and  1870  was  a  sort 
of  revenge  for  it,  just  as  the  Balkan  victory 
was  a  defiance  to  the  German  Reaction  and 
1 9 14  was  the  attempted  revenge  for  it.  It  is 
true  that  the  French  liberation  of  Italy  was 
incomplete,  the  problem  of  the  Papal  States, 
for  instance,  being  untouched  by  the  Peace 
of  Villafranca.  The  volcanic  but  fruitful 
spirit  of  Italy  had  already  produced  that 
wonderful,  wandering,  and  almost  omnipres- 
ent personality  whose  red  shirt  was  to  be  a 
walking  flag :  Garibaldi.  And  many  English 
Liberals  sympathised  with  him  and  his  ex- 
tremists as  against  the  peace.  Palmerston 
called  it  "the  peace  that  passeth  all  under- 
standing": but  the  profanity  of  that  hilari- 
ous old  heathen  was  nearer  the  mark  than  he 
knew:  there  were  really  present  some  of 
those  deep  things  which  he  did  not  under- 
stand. To  quarrel  with  the  Pope,  but  to 
compromise  with  him,  was  an  instinct  with 
the  Bonapartes ;  an  instinct  no  Anglo-Saxon 
could  be  expected  to  understand.  They  knew 
the  truth;  that  Anti-Clericalism  is  not  a 
Protestant  movement,  but  a  Catholic  mood. 
And  after  all  the  English  Liberals  could  not 


122  The  Crimes  of  England 

get  their  own  Government  to  risk  what  the 
French  Government  had  risked;  and  Napo- 
leon III.  might  well  have  retorted  on  Palm- 
erston,  his  rival  in  international  Liberalism, 
that  half  a  war  was  better  than  no  fighting. 
Swinburne  called  Villafranca  *'The  Halt 
before  Rome,"  and  expressed  a  rhythmic  im- 
patience for  the  time  when  the  world 

"Shall  ring  to  the  roar  of  the  lion 
Proclaiming  Republican  Rome." 

But  he  might  have  remembered,  after  all, 
that  it  was  not  the  British  lion,  that  a  Brit- 
ish poet  should  have  the  right  to  say  so  im- 
periously, "Let  him  roar  again.  Let  him 
roar  again." 

It  is  true  that  there  was  no  clear  call  to 
England  from  Italy,  as  there  certainly  was 
from  Denmark.  The  great  powers  were  not 
bound  to  help  Italy  to  become  a  nation,  as 
they  were  bound  to  support  the  unquestioned 
fact  that  Denmark  was  one.  Indeed  the 
great  Italian  patriot  was  to  experience  both 
extremes  of  the  English  paradox,  and,  curi- 
ously enough,  in  connection  with  both  the 
two  national  and  anti-German  causes.    For 


The  Midnight  of  Europe         123 

Italy  he  gained  the  support  of  the  English, 
but  not  the  support  of  England.  Not  a  few 
of  our  countrymen  followed  the  red  shirt; 
but  not  in  the  red  coat.  And  when  he  came 
to  England,  not  to  plead  the  cause  of  Italy 
but  the  cause  of  Denmark,  the  Italian  found 
he  was  more  popular  with  the  English  than 
any  Englishman.  He  made  his  way  through 
a  forest  of  salutations,  which  would  will- 
ingly have  turned  itself  into  a  forest  of 
swords.  But  those  who  kept  the  sword  kept 
it  sheathed.  For  the  ruling  class  the  val- 
our of  the  Italian  hero,  like  the  beauty  of 
the  Danish  Princess,  was  a  thing  to  be  ad- 
mired, that  is  enjoyed,  like  a  novel — or  a 
newspaper.  Palmerston  was  the  very  type 
of  Pacifism,  because  he  was  the  very  type  of 
Jingoism.  In  spirit  as  restless  as  Garibaldi, 
he  was  in  practice  as  cautious  as  Cobden. 
England  had  the  most  prudent  aristocracy, 
but  the  most  reckless  democracy  in  the 
world.  It  was,  and  is,  the  English  contra- 
diction, which  has  so  much  misrepresented 
us,  especially  to  the  Irish.  Our  national  cap- 
tains were  carpet  knights;  our  knights  er- 
rant were  among  the  dismounted  rabble. 
When  an  Austrian  general  who  had  flogged 


124         The  Crimes  of  England 

women  in  the  conquered  provinces  appeared 
in  the  London  streets,  some  common  dray- 
men off  a  cart  behaved  with  the  direct  quix- 
otry of  Sir  Lancelot  or  Sir  Galahad.  He 
had  beaten  women  and  they  beat  him.  They 
regarded  themselves  simply  as  avengers  of 
ladies  in  distress,  breaking  the  bloody  whip 
of  a  German  bully;  just  as  Cobbett  had 
sought  to  break  it  when  it  was  wielded  over 
the  men  of  England.  The  boorishness  was 
in  the  Germanic  or  half-Germanic  rulers 
who  wore  crosses  and  spurs:  the  gallantry 
was  in  the  gutter.  English  draymen  had 
more  chivalry  than  Teuton  aristocrats— or 
English  ones. 

I  have  dwelt  a  little  on  this  Italian  experi- 
ment because  it  lights  up  Louis  Napoleon  as 
what  he  really  was  before  the  eclipse,  a  poli- 
tician— perhaps  an  unscrupulous  politician 
— but  certainly  a  democratic  politician.  A 
power  seldom  falls  being  wholly  faultless; 
and  it  is  true  that  the  Second  Empire  became 
contaminated  with  cosmopolitan  spies  and 
swindlers,  justly  reviled  by  such  democrats 
as  Rochefort  as  well  as  Hugo.  But  there 
was  no  French  inefficiency  that  weighed  a 
hair  in  the  balance  compared  with  the  huge 


The  Midnight  of  Europe         125 

and  hostile  efficiency  of  Prussia ;  the  tall  ma- 
chine that  had  struck  down  Denmark  and 
Austria,  and  now  stood  ready  to  strike 
again,  extinguishing  the  lamp  of  the  world. 
There  was  a  hitch  before  the  hammer  stroke, 
and  Bismarck  adjusted  it,  as  with  his  finger, 
by  a  forgery — for  he  had  many  minor  ac- 
complishments. France  fell:  and  what  fell 
with  her  was  freedom,  and  what  reigned  in 
her  stead  only  tyrants  and  the  ancient  terror. 
The  crowning  of  the  first  modern  Kaiser  in 
the  very  palace  of  the  old  French  kings  was 
an  allegory;  like  an  allegory  on  those  Ver- 
sailles walls.  For  it  was  at  once  the  lifting 
of  the  old  despotic  diadem  and  its  descent 
on  the  low  brow  of  a  barbarian.  Louis  XI. 
had  returned,  and  not  Louis  IX.;  and 
Europe  was  to  know  that  sceptre  on  which 
there  is  no  dove. 

The  instant  evidence  that  Europe  was  m 
the  grip  of  the  savage  was  as  simple  as  it 
was  sinister.  The  invaders  behaved  with  an 
innocent  impiety  and  bestiality  that  had 
never  been  known  in  those  lands  since  Clovis 
was  signed  with  the  cross.  To  the  naked 
pride  of  the  new  men  nations  simply  were 
not.    The  struggling  populations  of  two  vast 


126  The  Crimes  of  England 

provinces  were  simply  carried  away  like 
slaves  into  captivity,  as  after  the  sacking  of 
some  prehistoric  town.  France  was  fined 
for  having  pretended  to  be  a  nation;  and 
the  fine  was  planned  to  ruin  her  forever. 
Under  the  pressure  of  such  impossible  injus- 
tice France  cried  out  to  the  Christian  na- 
tions, one  after  another,  and  by  name.  Her 
last  cry  ended  in  a  stillness  like  that  which 
had  encircled  Denmark. 

One  man  answered;  one  who  had  quar- 
relled with  the  French  and  their  Emperor; 
but  who  knew  it  was  not  an  emperor  that 
had  fallen.  Garibaldi,  not  always  wise  but 
to  his  end  a  hero,  took  his  station,  sword  in 
hand,  under  the  darkening  sky  of  Christen- 
dom, and  shared  the  last  fate  of  France. 
A  curious  record  remains,  in  which  a  Ger- 
man commander  testifies  to  the  energy  and 
effect  of  the  last  strokes  of  the  wounded 
lion  of  Aspromonte.  But  England  went 
away  sorrowful,  for  she  had  great  posses- 
sions. 


VIII — The  Wrong  Horse 


IN  another  chapter  I  mentioned  some  of 
the  late  Lord  Salisbury's  remarks  with 
regret,  but  I  trust  with  respect;  for 
in  certain  matters  he  deserved  all  the 
respect  that  can  be  given  to  him.  His  crit- 
ics said  that  he  "thought  aloud";  which  is 
perhaps  the  noblest  thing  that  can  be  said  of 
a  man.  He  was  jeered  at  for  it  by  journal- 
ists and  politicians  who  had  not  the  capacity 
to  think  or  the  courage  to  tell  their  thoughts. 
And  he  had  one  yet  finer  quality  which  re- 
deems a  hundred  lapses  of  anarchic  cyni- 
cism. He  could  change  his  mind  upon  the 
platform:  he  could  repent  in  public.  He 
could  not  only  think  aloud;  he  could  "think 
better"  aloud.  And  one  of  the  turning- 
points  of  Europe  had  come  in  the  hour  when 
he  avowed  his  conversion  from  the  un-Chris- 
tian  and  un-European  policy  into  which  his 
dexterous  Oriental  master,  Disraeli,  had 
dragged  him ;  and  declared  that  England  had 
"put  her  money  on  the  wrong  horse."  When 
he  said  it,  he  referred  to  the  backing  we  gave 

127 


128         The  Crimes  of  England 

to  the  Turk  under  a  fallacious  fear  of  Rus- 
sia. But  I  cannot  but  think  that  if  he  had 
lived  much  longer,  he  would  have  come  to 
feel  the  same  disgust  for  his  long  diplomatic 
support  of  the  Turk's  great  ally  in  the  North. 
He  did  not  live,  as  we  have  lived,  to  feel  that 
horse  run  away  with  us,  and  rush  on 
through  wilder  and  wilder  places,  until  we 
knew  that  we  were  riding  on  the  nightmare. 

What  was  this  thing  to  which  we  trusted? 
And  how  may  we  most  quickly  explain  its  de- 
velopment from  a  dream  to  a  nightmare,  and 
the  hair's-breadth  escape  by  which  it  did  not 
hurl  us  to  destruction,  as  it  seems  to  be  hurl- 
ing the  Turk?  It  is  a  certain  spirit;  and 
we  must  not  ask  for  too  logical  a  definition 
of  it,  for  the  people  whom  it  possesses  dis- 
own logic;  and  the  whole  thing  is  not  so 
much  a  theory  as  a  confusion  of  thought. 
Its  widest  and  most  elementary  character  is 
adumbrated  in  the  word  Teutonism  or  Pan- 
Germanism;  and  with  this  (which  was  what 
appeared  to  win  in  1870)  we  had  better  be- 
gin. The  nature  of  Pan-Germanism  may 
be  allegorised  and  abbreviated  somewhat 
thus: 

The  horse  asserts  that  all  other  creatures 


The  Wrong  Horse  129 

are  morally  bound  to  sacrifice  their  inter- 
ests to  his,  on  the  specific  ground  that  he  pos- 
sesses all  noble  and  necessary  qualities,  and 
is  an  end  in  himself.  It  is  pointed  out  in  an- 
swer that  when  climbing  a  tree  the  horse  is 
less  graceful  than  the  cat;  that  lovers  and 
poets  seldom  urge  the  horse  to  make  a  noise 
all  night  like  the  nightingale;  that  when  sub- 
merged for  some  long  time  under  water,  he 
is  less  happy  than  the  haddock;  and  that 
when  he  is  cut  open  pearls  are  less  often 
found  in  him  than  in  an  oyster.  He  is  not 
content  to  answer  (though,  being  a  muddle- 
headed  horse,  he  does  use  this  answer  also) 
that  having  an  undivided  hoof  is  more  than 
pearls  or  oceans  or  all  ascension  or  song. 
He  reflects  for  a  few  years  on  the  subject 
of  cats;  and  at  last  discovers  in  the  cat  "the 
characteristic  equine  quality  of  caudality,  or 
a  tail" ;  so  that  cats  are  horses,  and  wave  on 
every  tree-top  the  tail  which  is  the  equine 
banner.  Nightingales  are  found  to  have 
legs,  which  explains  their  power  of  song. 
Haddocks  are  vertebrates;  and  therefore  are 
sea-horses.  And  though  the  oyster  out- 
wardly presents  dissimilarities  which  seem 
to  divide  him  from  the  horse,  he  is  by  the 


130         TJie  Crimes  of  England 

all-filling  nature-might  of  the  same  horse- 
moving  energy  sustained. 

Now  this  horse  is  intellectually  the  wrong 
horse.  It  is  not  perhaps  going  too  far  to  say 
that  this  horse  is  a  donkey.  For  it  is  ob- 
viously within  even  the  intellectual  resources 
of  a  haddock  to  answer,  "But  if  a  haddock 
is  a  horse,  why  should  I  yield  to  you  any 
more  than  you  to  me?  Why  should  that 
singing  horse  commonly  called  the  nightin- 
gale, or  that  climbing  horse  hitherto  known 
as  the  cat,  fall  down  and  worship  you  be- 
cause of  your  horsehood?  If  all  our  native 
faculties  are  the  accomplishments  of  a  horse 
— why  then  you  are  only  another  horse  with- 
out any  accomplishments."  When  thus 
gently  reasoned  with,  the  horse  flings  up  his 
heels,  kicks  the  cat,  crushes  the  oyster,  eats 
the  haddock  and  pursues  the  nightingale,  and 
that  is  how  the  war  began. 

This  apologue  is  not  in  the  least  more 
fantastic  than  the  facts  of  the  Teutonic 
claim.  The  Germans  do  really  say  that  Eng- 
lishmen are  only  Sea-Germans,  as  our  had- 
docks were  only  sea-horses.  They  do  really 
say  that  the  nightingales  of  Tuscany  or  the 
pearls  of  Hellas  must  somehow  be  German 


The  Wrong  Horse  131 

birds  or  German  jewels.  They  do  maintain 
that  the  Italian  Renaissance  was  really  the 
German  Renaissance,  pure  Germans  having 
Italian  names  when  they  were  painters,  as 
cockneys  sometimes  have  when  they  are 
hair-dressers.  They  suggest  that  Jesus  and 
the  great  Jews  were  Teutonic.  One  Teuton- 
ist  I  read  actually  explained  the  fresh  en- 
ergy of  the  French  Revolution  and  the  stale 
privileges  of  its  German  enemies  by  saying 
that  the  Germanic  soul  awoke  in  France  and 
attacked  the  Latin  influence  in  Germany. 
On  the  advantages  of  this  method  I  need  not 
dwell:  if  you  are  annoyed  at  Jack  Johnson 
knocking  out  an  English  prize-fighter,  you 
have  only  to  say  that  it  was  the  whiteness  of 
the  black  man  that  won  and  the  blackness  of 
the  white  man  that  was  beaten.  But  about 
the  Italian  Renaissance  they  are  less  general 
and  will  go  into  detail.  They  will  discover 
(in  their  researches  into  'istry,  as  Mr.  Gan- 
dish  said)  that  Michael  Angelo's  surname 
was  Buonarotti ;  and  they  will  point  out  that 
the  word  "roth"  is  very  like  the  word  "rot." 
Which,  in  one  sense,  is  true  enough.  Most 
Englishmen  will  be  content  to  say  it  is  all 
rot  and  pass  on.     It  is  all  of  a  piece  with 


132  The  Crimes  of  England 


the  preposterous  Prussian  history,  which 
talks,  for  instance,  about  the  "perfect  re- 
ligious tolerance  of  the  Goths" ;  which  is  like 
talking  about  the  legal  impartiality  of  chick- 
en-pox. He  will  decline  to  believe  that  the 
Jews  were  Germans ;  though  he  may  perhaps 
have  met  some  Germans  who  were  Jews. 
But  deeper  than  any  such  practical  reply,  lies 
the  deep  inconsistency  of  the  parable.  It  is 
simply  this;  that  if  Teutonism  be  used  for 
comprehension  it  cannot  be  used  for  con- 
quest. If  all  intelligent  peoples  are  Ger- 
mans, then  Prussians  are  only  the  least  in- 
telligent Germans.  If  the  men  of  Flanders 
are  as  German  as  the  men  of  Frankfort,  we 
can  only  say  that  in  saving  Belgium  we  are 
helping  the  Germans  who  are  in  the  right 
against  the  Germans  who  are  in  the  wrong. 
Thus  in  Alsace  the  conquerors  are  forced 
into  the  comic  posture  of  annexing  the  peo- 
ple for  being  German  and  then  persecuting 
them  for  being  French.  The  French  Teu- 
tons who  built  Rheims  must  surrender  it  to 
the  South  German  Teutons  who  have  partly 
built  Cologne;  and  these  in  turn  surrender 
Cologne  to  the  North  German  Teutons,  who 
never  built  anything,   except   the   wooden 


The  Wrong  Horse  133 

Aunt  Sally  of  old  Hindenburg.  Every  Teu- 
ton must  fall  on  his  face  before  an  inferior 
Teuton;  until  they  all  find,  in  the  foul 
marshes  towards  the  Baltic,  the  very  lowest 
of  all  possible  Teutons,  and  worship  him — 
and  find  he  is  a  Slav.  So  much  for  Pan- 
Germanism. 

But  though  Teutonism  is  indefinable,  or 
at  least  is  by  the  Teutons  undefined,  it  is  not 
unreal.  A  vague  but  genuine  soul  does  pos- 
sess all  peoples  who  boast  of  Teutonism; 
and  has  possessed  ourselves,  in  so  far  as  we 
have  been  touched  by  that  folly.  Not  a  race, 
but  rather  a  religion,  the  thing  exists;  and 
in  1870  its  sun  was  at  noon.  We  can  most 
briefly  describe  it  under  three  heads. 

The  victory  of  the  German  arms  meant 
before  Leipzic,  and  means  now,  the  over- 
throw of  a  certain  idea.  That  idea  is  the 
idea  of  the  Citizen.  This  is  true  in  a  quite 
abstract  and  courteous  sense;  and  is  not 
meant  as  a  loose  charge  of  oppression.  Its 
truth  is  quite  compatible  with  a  view  that 
the  Germans  are  better  governed  than  the 
French.  In  many  ways  the  Germans  are 
very  well  governed.  But  they  might  be  gov- 
erned ten  thousand  times  better  than  they 


134         The  Crimes  of  England 


are,  or  than  anybody  ever  can  be,  and  still 
be  as  far  as  ever  from  governing.  The  idea 
of  the  Citizen  is  that  his  individual  human 
nature  shall  be  constantly  and  creatively  ac- 
tive in  altering  the  State.  The  Germans  are 
right  in  regarding  the  idea  as  dangerously 
revolutionary.  Every  Citizen  is  a  revolu- 
tion. That  is,  he  destroys,  devours  and 
adapts  his  environment  to  the  extent  of  his 
own  thought  and  conscience.  This  is  what 
separates  the  human  social  effort  from  the 
non-human ;  the  bee  creates  the  honey-comb, 
but  he  does  not  criticise  it.  The  German 
ruler  really  does  feed  and  train  the  Ger- 
man as  carefully  as  a  gardener  waters  a 
flower.  But  if  the  flower  suddenly  began  to 
water  the  gardener,  he  would  be  much  sur- 
prised. So  in  Germany  the  people  really  are 
educated ;  but  in  France  the  people  educates. 
The  French  not  only  make  up  the  State,  but 
make  the  State;  not  only  make  it,  but  re- 
make it.  In  Germany  the  ruler  is  the  artist, 
always  painting  the  happy  German  like  a 
portrait ;  in  France  the  Frenchman  is  the  ar- 
tist, always  painting  and  repainting  France 
like  a  house.  No  state  of  social  good  that 
does  not  mean  the  Citizen  choosing  good,  as 


The  Wrong  Horse  135 

well  as  getting  it,  has  the  idea  of  the  Citizen 
at  all.  To  say  the  Germanies  are  naturally 
at  war  with  this  idea  is  merely  to  respect 
them  and  take  them  seriously:  otherwise 
their  war  on  the  French  Revolution  would 
be  only  an  ignorant  feud.  It  is  this,  to  them, 
risky  and  fanciful  notion  of  the  critical  and 
creative  Citizen,  which  in  1870  lay  prostrate 
under  United  Germany — under  the  undi- 
vided hoof. 

Nevertheless,  when  the  German  says  he 
has  or  loves  freedom,  what  he  says  is  not 
false.  He  means  something;  and  what 
he  means  is  the  second  principle,  which  I 
may  summarise  as  the  Irresponsibility  of 
Thought.  Within  the  iron  framework  of 
the  fixed  State,  the  German  has  not  only  lib- 
erty but  anarchy.  Anything  can  be  said  al- 
though, or  rather  because,  nothing  can  be 
done.  Philosophy  is  really  free.  But  this 
practically  means  only  that  the  prisoner's  cell 
has  become  the  madman's  cell:  that  it  is 
scrawled  all  over  inside  with  stars  and  sys- 
tems, so  that  it  looks  like  eternity.  This  is 
the  contradiction  remarked  by  Dr.  Sarolea, 
in  his  brilliant  book,  between  the  wildness  of 
German  theory  and  the  tameness  of  German 


136  The  Crimes  of  England 

practice.  The  Germans  sterilise  thought, 
making  it  active  with  a  wild  virginity ;  which 
can  bear  no  fruit. 

But  though  there  are  so  many  mad  theo- 
ries, most  of  them  have  one  root;  and  de- 
pend upon  one  assumption.  It  matters  little 
whether  we  call  it,  with  the  German  Social- 
ists, ''the  Materialist  Theory  of  History"; 
or,  with  Bismarck,  ''blood  and  iron."  It  can 
be  put  most  fairly  thus:  that  all  important 
events  of  history  are  biological,  like  a  change 
of  pasture  or  the  communism  of  a  pack  of 
wolves.  Professors  are  still  tearing  their 
hair  in  the  effort  to  prove  somehow  that  the 
Crusaders  were  migrating  for  food  like 
swallows ;  or  that  the  French  Revolutionists 
were  somehow  only  swarming  like  bees. 
This  works  in  two  ways  often  accounted  op- 
posite ;  and  explains  both  the  German  Social- 
ist and  the  Junker.  For,  first,  it  fits  in  with 
Teutonic  Imperialism;  making  the  "blonde 
beasts"  of  Germania  into  lions  whose  nature 
it  is  to  eat  such  lambs  as  the  French.  The 
highest  success  of  this  notion  in  Europe  is 
marked  by  praise  given  to  a  race  famous  for 
its  physical  firmness  and  fighting  breed,  but 
which  has  frankly  pillaged  and  scarcely  pre- 


The  Wrong  Horse  137 

tended  to  rule ;  the  Turk,  whom  some  Tories 
called  **the  gentleman  of  Europe."  The 
Kaiser  paused  to  adore  the  Crescent  on  his 
way  to  patronise  the  Cross.  It  was  corpor- 
ately  embodied  when  Greece  attempted  a 
solitary  adventure  against  Turkey  and  was 
quickly  crushed.  That  English  guns  helped 
to  impose  the  mainly  Germanic  policy  of  the 
Concert  upon  Crete,  cannot  be  left  out  of 
mind  while  we  are  making  appeals  to  Greece 
— or  considering  the  crimes  of  England. 

But  the  same  principle  serves  to  keep  the 
internal  politics  of  the  Germans  quiet,  and 
prevent  Socialism  being  the  practical  hope  or 
peril  it  has  been  in  so  many  other  countries. 
It  operates  in  two  ways;  first,  by  a  curious 
fallacy  about  "the  time  not  being  ripe" — as 
if  time  could  ever  be  ripe.  The  same  sav- 
age superstition  from  the  forests  had  in- 
fected Matthew  Arnold  pretty  badly  when 
he  made  a  personality  out  of  the  Zeitgeist — 
perhaps  the  only  ghost  that  was  ever  entirely 
fabulous.  It  is  tricked  by  a  biological  paral- 
lel, by  which  the  chicken  always  comes  out 
of  the  tgg  *'at  the  right  time."  He  does  not ; 
he  comes  out  when  he  comes  out.  The 
Marxian  Socialist  will  not  strike  till  the 


138  The  Crimes  of  England 

clock  strikes ;  and  the  clock  is  made  in  Ger- 
many, and  never  strikes.  Moreover,  the 
theory  of  all  history  as  a  search  for  food 
makes  the  masses  content  with  having  food 
and  physic,  but  not  freedom.  The  best 
w^orking  model  in  the  matter  is  the  system 
of  Compulsory  Insurance;  which  was  a  total 
failure  and  dead  letter  in  France  but  has 
been,  in  the  German  sense,  a  great  success 
in  Germany.  It  treats  employed  persons  as 
a  fixed,  separate,  and  lower  caste,  who  must 
not  themselves  dispose  of  the  margin  of  their 
small  wages.  In  191 1  it  was  introduced  into 
England  by  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  who  had 
studied  its  operations  in  Germany,  and,  by 
the  Prussian  prestige  in  "social  reform," 
was  passed. 

These  three  tendencies  cohere,  or  are  co- 
hering, in  an  institution  which  is  not  with- 
out a  great  historical  basis  and  not  without 
great  modern  conveniences.  And  as  France 
was  the  standard-bearer  of  citizenship  in 
1798,  Germany  is  the  standard-bearer  of  this 
alternative  solution  in  1915.  The  institution 
which  our  fathers  called  Slavery  fits  in  with, 
or  rather  logically  flows  from,  all  the  three 
spirits  of  which  I  have  spoken,  and  prom- 


The  Wrong  Horse  139 

ises  great  advantages  to  each  of  them.  It 
can  give  the  individual  worker  everything 
except  the  power  to  alter  the  State — that  is, 
his  own  status.  Finality  (or  what  certain 
eleutheromaniacs  would  call  hopelessness) 
of  status  is  the  soul  of  Slavery — and  of 
Compulsory  Insurance.  Then  again,  Ger- 
many gives  the  individual  exactly  the  liberty 
that  has  always  been  given  to  a  slave — the 
liberty  to  think,  the  liberty  to  dream,  the  lib- 
erty to  rage;  the  liberty  to  indulge  in  any 
intellectual  hypotheses  about  the  unalterable 
world  and  state — such  as  have  always  been 
free  to  slaves,  from  the  stoical  maxims  of 
Epictetus  to  the  skylarking  fairy  tales  of 
Uncle  Remus.  And  it  has  been  truly  urged 
by  all  defenders  of  slavery  that,  if  history 
has  merely  a  material  test,  the  material  con- 
dition of  the  subordinate  under  slavery 
tends  to  be  good  rather  than  bad.  When  I 
once  pointed  out  how  precisely  the  "model 
village"  of  a  great  employer  reproduces  the 
safety  and  seclusion  of  an  old  slave  estate, 
the  employer  thought  it  quite  enough  to  an- 
swer indignantly  that  he  had  provided  baths, 
playing-grounds,  a  theatre,  etc.,  for  his 
workers.    He  would  probably  have  thought 


140  The  Crimes  of  England 

it  odd  to  hear  a  planter  in  South  Carolina 
boast  that  he  had  provided  banjos,  hymn- 
books,  and  places  suitable  for  the  cake-walk. 
Yet  the  planter  must  have  provided  the  ban- 
jos, for  a  slave  cannot  own  property.  And  if 
this  Germanic  sociology  is  indeed  to  prevail 
among  us,  I  think  some  of  the  broad-minded 
thinkers  who  concur  in  its  prevalence  owe 
something  like  an  apology  to  many  gallant 
gentlemen  whose  graves  lie  where  the  last 
battle  was  fought  in  the  Wilderness;  men 
who  had  the  courage  to  fight  for  it,  the  cour- 
age to  die  for  it  and,  above  all,  the  courage 
to  call  it  by  its  name. 

With  the  acceptance  by  England  of  the 
German  Insurance  Act,  I  bring  this  sketch 
of  the  past  relations  of  the  two  countries  to 
an  end.  I  have  written  this  book  because  I 
wish,  once  and  for  all,  to  be  done  with  my 
friend  Professor  Whirlwind  of  Prussia,  who 
has  long  despaired  of  really  defending  his 
own  country,  and  has  fallen  back  upon  abus- 
ing mine.  He  has  dropped,  amid  general 
derision,  his  attempt  to  call  a  thing  right 
when  even  the  Chancellor  who  did  it  called 
it  wrong.  But  he  has  an  idea  that  if  he  can 
show  that  somebody  from  England  some- 


Tlie  Wrong  Horse  141 

where  did  another  wrong,  the  two  wrongs 
may  make  a  right.  Against  the  cry  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Poles  the  Prussian  has 
never  done,  or  even  pretended  to  do,  any- 
thing but  harden  his  heart;  but  he  has  (such 
are  the  lovable  inconsistencies  of  human  na- 
ture) a  warm  corner  in  his  heart  for  the 
Roman  Catholic  Irish,  He  has  not  a  word 
to  say  for  himself  about  the  campaign  in 
Belgium,  but  he  still  has  many  wise,  re- 
proachful words  to  utter  about  the  campaign 
in  South  Africa.  I  propose  to  take  those 
words  out  of  his  mouth.  I  will  have  nothing 
to  do  with  the  fatuous  front-bench  preten- 
sions that  our  governors  always  govern  well, 
that  our  statesmen  are  never  whitewashed 
and  never  in  need  of  whitewash.  The  only 
moral  superiority  I  claim  is  that  of  not  de- 
fending the  indefensible.  I  most  earnestly 
urge  my  countrymen  not  to  hide  behind  thin 
official  excuses,  which  the  sister  kingdoms 
and  the  subject  races  can  easily  see  through. 
We  can  confess  that  our  crimes  have  been  as 
mountains,  and  still  not  be  afraid  of  the 
present  comparison.  There  may  be,  in  the 
eyes  of  some,  a  risk  in  dwelling  in  this  dark 
hour  on  our  failures  in  the  past:  I  believe 


142  The  Crimes  of  England 

profoundly  that  the  risk  is  all  the  other  way. 
I  believe  that  the  most  deadly  danger  to  our 
arms  to-day  lies  in  any  whiiT  of  that  self- 
praise,  any  flavour  of  that  moral  cowardice, 
any  glimpse  of  that  impudent  and  ultimate 
impenitence,  that  may  make  one  Boer  or 
Scot  or  Welshman  or  Irishman  or  Indian 
feel  that  he  is  only  smoothing  the  path  for 
a  second  Prussia.  I  have  passed  the  great 
part  of  my  life  in  criticising  and  condemning 
the  existing  rulers  and  institutions  of  my 
country :  I  think  it  is  infinitely  the  most  pa- 
triotic thing  that  a  man  can  do.  I  have  no  il- 
lusions either  about  our  past  or  our  pres- 
ent. I  think  our  whole  history  in  Ireland  has 
been  a  vulgar  and  ignorant  hatred  of  the 
crucifix,  expressed  by  a  crucifixion.  I  think 
the  South  African  War  was  a  dirty  work 
which  we  did  under  the  whips  of  money- 
lenders. I  think  Mitchelstown  was  a  dis- 
grace ;  I  think  Denshawi  was  a  devilry. 

Yet  there  is  one  part  of  life  and  history  in 
which  I  would  assert  the  absolute  spotless- 
ness  of  England.  In  one  department  we 
wear  a  robe  of  white  and  a  halo  of  inno- 
cence. Long  and  weary  as  may  be  the  rec- 
ords of  our  wickedness,  in  one  direction  we 


The  Wrong  Horse  143 

have  done  nothing  but  good.  Whoever  we 
may  have  wronged,  we  have  never  wronged 
Germany.  Again  and  again  we  have 
dragged  her  from  under  the  just  vengeance 
of  her  enemies,  from  the  holy  anger  of  Ma- 
ria Teresa,  from  the  impatient  and  con- 
temptuous common  sense  of  Napoleon.  We 
have  kept  a  ring  fence  around  the  Germans 
while  they  sacked  Denmark  and  dismem- 
bered France.  And  if  we  had  served  our 
God  as  we  have  served  their  kings,  there 
would  not  be  to-day  one  remnant  of  them  in 
our  path,  either  to  slander  or  to  slay  us. 


IX — The  Awakening  of  England 

IN  October  1912  silent  and  seemingly 
uninhabited  crags  and  chasms  in  the 
high  western  region  of  the  Balkans 
echoed  and  re-echoed  with  a  single 
shot.  It  was  fired  by  the  hand  of  a  king — 
a  real  king,  who  sat  listening  to  his  people  in 
front  of  his  own  house  (for  it  was  hardly  a 
palace),  and  who,  in  consequence  of  his  lis- 
tening to  the  people,  not  unfrequently  im- 
prisoned the  politicians.  It  is  said  of  him 
that  his  great  respect  for  Gladstone  as  the 
western  advocate  of  Balkan  freedom  was 
slightly  shadowed  by  the  fact  that  Gladstone 
did  not  succeed  in  effecting  the  bodily  cap- 
ture of  Jack  the  Ripper.  This  simple  mon- 
arch knew  that  if  a  malefactor  were  the  ter- 
ror of  the  mountain  hamlets,  his  subjects 
would  expect  him  personally  to  take  arms 
and  pursue  the  ruffian ;  and  if  he  refused  to 
do  so,  would  very  probably  experiment  with 
another  king.  And  the  same  primitive  con- 
ception of  a  king  being  kept  for  some  kind 
of  purpose,  led  them  also  to  expect  him  to 

145 


146  The  Crimes  of  England 

lead  in  a  foreign  campaign,  and  it  was  with 
his  own  hand  that  he  fired  the  first  shot  of 
the  war  which  brought  down  into  the  dust 
the  ancient  empire  of  the  Grand  Turk. 

His  kingdom  was  Httle  more  than  the 
black  mountain  after  which  it  was  named: 
we  commonly  refer  to  it  under  its  Italian 
translation  of  Montenegro.  It  is  worth 
while  to  pause  for  a  moment  upon  his  pic- 
turesque and  peculiar  community,  because  it 
is  perhaps  the  simplest  working  model  of 
all  that  stood  in  the  path  of  the  great  Ger- 
manic social  machine  I  have  described  in  the 
last  chapter — stood  in  its  path  and  was  soon 
to  be  very  nearly  destroyed  by  its  onset.  It 
was  a  branch  of  the  Serbian  stock  which  had 
climbed  into  this  almost  inaccessible  eyrie, 
and  thence,  for  many  hundred  years,  had 
mocked  at  the  predatory  empire  of  the 
Turks.  The  Serbians  in  their  turn  were  but 
one  branch  of  the  peasant  Slavs,  millions  of 
whom  are  spread  over  Russia  and  subject  on 
many  sides  to  empires  with  which  they  have 
less  sympathy;  and  the  Slavs  again,  in  the 
broad  features  which  are  important  here, 
are  not  merely  Slavonic  but  simply  Euro- 
pean.   But  a  particular  picture  is  generally 


The  Awakening  of  England      147 

more  pointed  and  intelligible  than  tenden- 
cies which  elsewhere  are  mingled  with  sub- 
tler tendencies;  and  of  this  unmixed  Euro- 
pean simplicity  Montenegro  is  an  excellent 
model. 

Moreover,  the  instance  of  one  small  Chris- 
tian State  will  serve  to  emphasise  that  this 
is  not  a  quarrel  between  England  and  Ger- 
many, but  between  Europe  and  Germany. 
It  is  my  whole  purpose  in  these  pages  not 
to  spare  my  own  country  where  it  is  open  to 
criticism;  and  I  freely  admit  that  Montene- 
gro, morally  and  politically  speaking,  is  al- 
most as  much  in  advance  of  England  as  it  is 
of  Germany.  In  Montenegro  there  are  no 
millionaires — and  therefore  next  to  no  So- 
cialists. As  to  why  there  are  no  million- 
aires, it  is  a  mystery,  and  best  studied 
among  the  mysteries  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
By  some  of  the  dark  ingenuities  of  that  age 
of  priestcraft  a  curious  thing  was  discov- 
ered— that  if  you  kill  every  usurer,  every 
forestaller,  every  adulterater,  every  user  of 
false  weights,  every  fixer  of  false  bound- 
aries, every  land-thief,  every  water-thief, 
you  afterwards  discover  by  a  strange  indi- 
rect  miracle,   or   disconnected   truth   from 


148  The  Crimes  of  England 


heaven,    that    you    have    no    millionaires. 
Without  dwelling  further  on  this  dark  mat- 
ter, we  may  say  that  this  great  gap  in  the 
Montenegrin  experience  explains  the  other 
great    gap — the    lack    of    Socialists.      The 
Class-conscious  Proletarian  of  All  Lands  is 
curiously  absent  from  this  land.    The  reason 
(I  have  sometimes  fancied)  is  that  the  Pro- 
letarian is  class-conscious,  not  because  he  is 
a  Proletarian  of  All  Lands,  but  because  he 
is  a  Proletarian  with  no  lands.    The  poor 
people  in  Montenegro  have  lands — not  land- 
lords.   They  have  roots;  for  the  peasant  is 
the  root  of  the  priest,  the  poet,  and  the  war- 
rior.   And  this,  and  not  a  mere  recrimina- 
tion about  acts  of  violence,  is  the  ground  of 
the  age-long  Balkan  bitterness  against  the 
Turkish  conqueror.     Montenegrins  are  pa- 
triotic for  Montenegro;  but  Turks  are  not 
patriotic  for  Turkey.    They  never  heard  of 
it,  in  fact.    They  are  Bedouins,  as  homeless 
as  the  desert.    The  ''wrong  horse"  of  Lord 
Salisbury  was  an  Arab  steed,  only  stabled 
in  Byzantium.     It  is  hard  enough  to  rule 
vagabond  people,  like  the  gypsies.     To  be 
ruled  by  them  is  impossible. 

Nevertheless  what  was  called  the  nine- 


The  Awakening  of  England      149 

teenth  century,  and  named  with  a  sort  of 
transcendental  faith  (as  in  a  Pythagorean 
worship  of  number),  was  wearing  to  its 
close  with  reaction  everywhere,  and  the 
Turk,  the  great  type  of  reaction,  stronger 
than  ever  in  the  saddle.  The  most  civilised 
of  the  Christian  nations  overshadowed  by 
the  Crescent  dared  to  attack  it  and  was  over- 
whelmed in  a  catastrophe  that  seemed  as  un- 
answerable as  Hittin.  In  England  Glad- 
stone and  Gladstonism  were  dead;  and  Mr. 
Kipling,  a  less  mystical  Carlyle,  was  expend- 
ing a  type  of  praise  upon  the  British  Army 
which  would  have  been  even  more  appropri- 
ate to  the  Prussian  Army.  The  Prussian 
Army  ruled  Prussia;  Prussia  ruled  Ger- 
many; Germany  ruled  the  Concert  of 
Europe.  She  was  planting  everywhere  the 
appliances  of  that  new  servile  machinery 
which  was  her  secret;  the  absolute  identifi- 
cation of  national  subordination  with  busi- 
ness employment ;  so  that  Krupp  could  count 
on  Kaiser  and  Kaiser  on  Krupp.  Every 
other  commercial  traveller  was  pathetically 
proud  of  being  both  a  slave  and  a  spy.  The 
old  and  the  new  tyrants  had  taken  hands. 
The  "sack"  of  the  boss  was  as  silent  and 


150  The  Crimes  of  England 

fatal  as  the  sack  of  the  Bosphorus.    And  the 
dream  of  the  citizen  was  at  an  end. 

It  was  under  a  sky  so  leaden  and  on  a 
road  so  strewn  with  bones  that  the  little 
mountain  democracy  with  its  patriarchal 
prince  went  out,  first  and  before  all  its 
friends,  on  the  last  and  seemingly  the  most 
hopeless  of  the  rebellions  against  the  Otto- 
man Empire.  Only  one  of  the  omens  seemed 
other  than  disastrous;  and  even  that  was 
doubtful.  For  the  successful  Mediterranean 
attack  on  Tripoli  while  proving  the  gallan- 
try of  the  Italians  (if  that  ever  needed  prov- 
ing) could  be  taken  in  two  ways,  and  was 
seen  by  many,  and  probably  most,  sincere 
liberals  as  a  mere  extension  of  the  Imperial- 
ist reaction  of  Bosnia  and  Paardeberg,  and 
not  as  the  promise  of  newer  things.  Italy, 
it  must  be  remembered,  was  still  supposed  to 
be  the  partner  of  Prussia  and  the  Haps- 
burgs.  For  days  that  seemed  like  months 
the  microscopic  state  seemed  to  be  attempt- 
ing alone  what  the  Crusades  had  failed  to 
accomplish.  And  for  days  Europe  and  the 
great  powers  were  thunderstruck,  again  and 
yet  again,  by  the  news  of  Turkish  forts  fall- 
ing, Turkish  cohorts  collapsing,  the  uncon- 


The  Awakening  of  England      151 

querable  Crescent  going  down  in  blood.  The 
Serbians,  the  Bulgarians,  the  Greeks  had 
gathered  and  risen  from  their  lairs ;  and  men 
knew  that  these  peasants  had  done  what  all 
the  politicians  had  long  despaired  of  doing, 
and  that  the  spirit  of  the  first  Christian  Em- 
peror was  already  standing  over  the  city  that 
is  named  after  his  name. 

For  Germany  this  quite  unexpected  rush 
was  a  reversal  of  the  whole  tide  of  the  world. 
It  was  as  if  the  Rhine  itself  had  returned 
from  the  ocean  and  retired  into  the  Alps. 
For  a  long  time  past  every  important  polit- 
ical process  in  Europe  had  been  produced 
or  permitted  by  Prussia.  She  had  pulled 
down  ministers  in  France  and  arrested  re- 
forms in  Russia.  Her  ruler  was  acclaimed 
by  Englishmen  like  Rhodes,  and  Americans 
like  Roosevelt,  as  the  great  prince  of  the  age. 
One  of  the  most  famous  and  brilliant  of  our 
journalists  called  him  "the  Lord  Chief  Jus- 
tice of  Europe."  He  was  the  strongest  man 
in  Christendom;  and  he  had  confirmed  and 
consecrated  the  Crescent.  And  when  he  had 
consecrated  it  a  few  hill  tribes  had  risen  and 
trampled  it  like  mire.  One  or  two  other 
things  about  the  same  time,  less  important  in 


152  The  Crimes  of  England 

themselves,  struck  in  the  Prussian's  ear  the 
same  new  note  of  warning  and  doubt.  He 
sought  to  obtain  a  small  advantage  on  the 
north-west  coast  of  Africa;  and  England 
seemed  to  show  a  certain  strange  stiffness  in 
insisting  on  its  abandonment.  In  the  coun- 
cils over  Morocco,  England  agreed  with 
France  with  what  did  not  seem  altogether  an 
accidental  agreement.  But  we  shall  not  be 
wrong  if  we  put  the  crucial  point  of  the  Ger- 
man surprise  and  anger  at  the  attack  from 
the  Balkans  and  the  fall  of  Adrianople.  Not 
only  did  it  menace  the  key  of  Asia  and  the 
whole  Eastern  dream  of  German  commerce ; 
not  only  did  it  offer  the  picture  of  one  army 
trained  by  France  and  victorious,  and  an- 
other army  trained  by  Germany  and  beaten. 
There  was  more  than  the  material  victory  of 
the  Creusot  over  the  Krupp  gun.  It  was 
also  the  victory  of  the  peasant's  field  over 
the  Krupp  factory.  By  this  time  there  was 
in  the  North  German  brain  an  awful  inver- 
sion of  all  the  legends  and  heroic  lives  that 
the  human  race  has  loved.  Prussia  hated 
romance.  Chivalry  was  not  a  thing  she  neg- 
lected ;  it  was  a  thing  that  tormented  her  as 
any  bully  is  tormented  by  an  unanswered 


TJie  Awakening  of  England      153 

challenge.  That  weird  process  was  com- 
pleted of  which  I  have  spoken  on  an  earlier 
page,  whereby  the  soul  of  this  strange  peo- 
ple was  everywhere  on  the  side  of  the  dragon 
against  the  knight,  of  the  giant  against  the 
hero.  Anything  unexpected — the  forlorn 
hopes,  the  eleventh-hour  inspirations,  by 
which  the  weak  can  elude  the  strong,  and 
which  take  the  hearts  of  happier  men  like 
trumpets — filled  the  Prussian  with  a  cold 
fury,  as  of  a  frustrated  fate.  The  Prussian 
felt  as  a  Chicago  pork  butcher  would  feel  if 
the  pigs  not  only  refused  to  pass  through  his 
machine,  but  turned  into  romantic  wild 
boars,  raging  and  rending,  calling  for  the 
old  hunting  of  princes  and  fit  to  be  the  crests 
of  kings. 

The  Prussian  saw  these  things  and  his 
mind  was  made  up.  He  was  silent;  but  he 
laboured:  laboured  for  three  long  years 
without  intermission  at  the  making  of  a  mili- 
tary machine  that  should  cut  out  of  the 
world  for  ever  such  romantic  accident  or 
random  adventure;  a  machine  that  should 
cure  the  human  pigs  for  ever  of  any  illusion 
that  they  had  wings.  That  he  did  so  plot 
and  prepare  for  an  attack  that  should  come 


154  The  Crimes  of  England 

from  him,  anticipating  and  overwhelming 
any  resistance,  is  now,  even  in  the  documents 
he  has  himself  published,  a  fact  of  common 
sense.  Suppose  a  man  sells  all  his  lands  ex- 
cept a  small  yard  containing  a  well ;  suppose 
in  the  division  of  the  effects  of  an  old  friend 
he  particularly  asks  for  his  razors;  suppose 
when  a  corded  trunk  is  sent  him  he  sends 
back  the  trunk,  but  keeps  the  cord.  And  then 
suppose  we  hear  that  a  rival  of  his  has  been 
lassoed  with  a  rope,  his  throat  then  cut,  ap- 
parently with  a  razor,  and  his  body  hidden 
in  a  well,  we  do  not  call  in  Sherlock  Holmes 
to  project  a  preliminary  suspicion  about  the 
guilty  party.  In  the  discussions  held  by  the 
Prussian  Government  with  Lord  Haldane 
and  Sir  Edward  Grey  we  can  now  see  quite 
as  plainly  the  meaning  of  the  things  that 
were  granted  and  the  things  that  were  with- 
held, the  things  that  would  have  satisfied  the 
Prussian  plotter  and  the  things  that  did  not 
satisfy  him.  The  German  Chancellor  re- 
fused an  English  promise  not  to  be  aggres- 
sive and  asked  instead  for  an  English  prom- 
ise to  be  neutral.  There  is  no  meaning  in 
the  distinction,  except  in  the  mind  of  an  ag- 
gressor.    Germany  proposed  a  pacific  ar- 


The  Awakening  of  England      155 

rangement  which  forbade  England  to  form 
a  fighting  alliance  with  France,  but  permit- 
ted Germany  to  retain  her  old  fighting  alli- 
ance with  Austria.  When  the  hour  of  war 
came  she  used  Austria,  used  the  old  fighting 
alliance  and  tried  to  use  the  new  idea  of 
English  neutrality.  That  is  to  say,  she  used 
the  rope,  the  razor,  and  the  well. 

But  it  was  either  by  accident  or  by  indi- 
vidual diplomatic  skill  that  England  at  the 
end  of  the  three  years  even  had  her  own 
hands  free  to  help  in  frustrating  the  Ger- 
man plot.  The  mass  of  the  English  people 
had  no  notion  of  such  a  plot;  and  indeed  re- 
garded the  occasional  suggestion  of  it  as 
absurd.  Nor  did  even  the  people  who  knew 
best  know  very  much  better.  Thanks  and 
even  apologies  are  doubtless  due  to  those 
who  in  the  deepest  lull  of  our  sleeping  part- 
nership with  Prussia  saw  her  not  as  a  part- 
ner but  a  potential  enemy;  such  men  as  Mr. 
Blatchford,  Mr.  Bart  Kennedy,  or  the  late 
Emil  Reich.  But  there  is  a  distinction  to  be 
made.  Few  even  of  these,  with  the  admir- 
able and  indeed  almost  magical  exception  of 
Dr.  Sarolea,  saw  Germany  as  she  was;  oc- 
cupied mainly  with  Europe  and  only  inci- 


156  The  Crimes  of  England 

dentally  with  England;  indeed,  in  the  first 
stages,  not  occupied  with  England  at  all. 
Even  the  Anti-Germans  were  too  insular. 
Even  those  who  saw  most  of  Germany's  plan 
saw  too  much  of  England's  part  in  it.  They 
saw  it  almost  wholly  as  a  commercial  and 
colonial  quarrel ;  and  saw  its  issue  under  the 
image  of  an  invasion  of  England,  which  is 
even  now  not  very  probable.  This  fear  of 
Germany  was  indeed  a  very  German  fear  of 
Germany.  This  also  conceived  the  English 
as  Sea-Germans.  It  conceived  Germany  as 
at  war  with  something  like  itself — practical, 
prosaic,  capitalist,  competitive  Germany, 
prepared  to  cut  us  up  in  battle  as  she  cut  us 
out  in  business.  The  time  of  our  larger  vi- 
sion was  not  yet,  when  we  should  realise 
that  Germany  was  more  deeply  at  war  with 
things  quite  unlike  herself,  things  from 
which  we  also  had  sadly  strayed.  Then  we 
should  remember  what  we  were  and  see 
whence  we  also  had  come ;  and  far  and  high 
upon  that  mountain  from  which  the  Crescent 
was  cast  down,  behold  what  was  everywhere 
the  real  enemy  of  the  Iron  Cross — the  peas- 
ant's cross,  which  is  of  wood. 

Even  our  very  slight  ripples  of  panic. 


The  Awakening  of  England      157 

therefore,  were  provincial,  and  even  shal- 
low; and  for  the  most  part  we  were  pos- 
sessed and  convinced  of  peace.  That  peace 
was  not  a  noble  one.  We  had  indeed 
reached  one  of  the  lowest  and  flattest  levels 
of  all  our  undulating  history;  and  it  must 
be  admitted  that  the  contemptuous  calcula- 
tion with  which  Germany  counted  on  our 
submission  and  abstention  was  not  alto- 
gether unfounded,  though  it  was,  thank  God, 
unfulfilled.  The  full  fruition  of  our  alli- 
ances against  freedom  had  come.  The  meek 
acceptance  of  Kultur  in  our  books  and 
schools  had  stiffened  what  was  once  a  free 
country  with  a  German  formalism  and  a 
German  fear.  By  a  queer  irony,  even  the 
same  popular  writer  who  had  already 
warned  us  against  the  Prussians,  had  sought 
to  preach  among  the  populace  a  very  Prus- 
sian fatalism,  pivoted  upon  the  importance 
of  the  charlatan  Haeckel.  The  wrestle  of 
the  two  great  parties  had  long  slackened  into 
an  embrace.  The  fact  was  faintly  denied, 
and  a  pretence  was  still  made  that  no  pact 
existed  beyond  a  common  patriotism.  But 
the  pretence  failed  altogether ;  for  it  was  evi- 
dent that  the  leaders  on  either  side,  so  far 


158  The  Crimes  of  England 

from  leading  in  divergent  directions,  were 
much  closer  to  each  other  than  to  their  own 
followers.  The  power  of  these  leaders  had 
enormously  increased;  but  the  distance  be- 
tween them  had  diminished,  or,  rather,  dis- 
appeared. It  was  said  about  1800,  in  deri- 
sion of  the  Foxite  rump,  that  the  Whig 
Party  came  down  to  Parliament  in  a  four- 
wheeler.  It  might  literally  be  said  in  1900 
that  the  Whig  Party  and  the  Tory  Party 
came  to  Parliament  in  a  hansom  cab.  It 
was  not  a  case  of  two  towers  rising  into  dif- 
ferent roofs  or  spires,  but  founded  in  the 
same  soil.  It  was  rather  the  case  of  an  arch, 
of  which  the  foundation-stones  on  either 
side  might  fancy  they  were  two  buildings; 
but  the  stones  nearest  the  keystone  would 
know  there  was  only  one.  This  "two-handed 
engine"  still  stood  ready  to  strike,  not,  in- 
deed, the  other  part  of  itself,  but  anyone 
who  ventured  to  deny  that  it  was  doing  so. 
We  were  ruled,  as  it  were,  by  a  Wonderland 
king  and  queen,  who  cut  off  our  heads,  not 
for  saying  they  quarrelled  but  for  saying 
they  didn't.  The  libel  law  was  now  used,  not 
to  crush  lies  about  private  life,  but  to  crush 
truths  about  public  life.    Representation  had 


The  Awakening  of  England      159 

become  mere  misrepresentation ;  a  maze  of 
loopholes.  This  was  mainly  due  to  the  mon- 
strous presence  of  certain  secret  moneys,  on 
which  alone  many  men  could  win  the  ruinous 
elections  of  the  age,  and  which  were  con- 
tributed and  distributed  with  less  check  or 
record  than  is  tolerated  in  the  lowest  trade 
or  club.  Only  one  or  two  people  attacked 
these  funds;  nobody  defended  them. 
Through  them  the  great  capitalists  had  the 
handle  of  politics,  as  of  everything  else.  The 
poor  were  struggling  hopelessly  against  ris- 
ing prices;  and  their  attempts  at  collective 
bargaining,  by  the  collective  refusal  of  bad- 
ly-paid work,  were  discussed  in  the  press. 
Liberal  and  Tory,  as  attacks  upon  the  State. 
And  so  they  were ;  upon  the  Servile  State. 

Such  was  the  condition  of  England  in 
1914,  when  Prussia,  now  at  last  armed  to  the 
teeth  and  secure  of  triumph,  stood  up  before 
the  world,  and  solemnly,  like  one  taking  a 
sacrament,  consecrated  her  campaign  with  a 
crime.  She  entered  by  a  forbidden  door,  one 
which  she  had  herself  forbidden — marching 
upon  France  through  neutralised  Belgium, 
where  every  step  was  on  her  broken  word. 
Her  neutralised  neighbours  resisted,  as  in- 


160  The  Crimes  of  England 

deed  they,  like  ourselves,  were  pledged  to  do. 
Instantly  the  whole  invasion  was  lit  up  with 
a  flame  of  moral  lunacy,  that  turned  the 
watching  nations  white  who  had  never 
known  the  Prussian.  The  statistics  of  non- 
combatants  killed  and  tortured  by  this  time 
only  stun  the  imagination.  But  two  friends 
of  my  own  have  been  in  villages  sacked  by 
the  Prussian  march.  One  saw  a  tabernacle 
containing  the  Sacrament  patiently  picked 
out  in  pattern  by  shot  after  shot.  The  other 
saw  a  rocking-horse  and  the  wooden  toys  in 
a  nursery  laboriously  hacked  to  pieces. 
Those  two  facts  together  will  be  enough  to 
satisfy  some  of  us  of  the  name  of  the  Spirit 
that  had  passed. 

And  then  a  strange  thing  happened.  Eng- 
land, that  had  not  in  the  modern  sense  any 
army  at  all,  was  justified  of  all  her  children. 
Respected  institutions  and  reputations  did 
indeed  waver  and  collapse  on  many  sides: 
though  the  chief  of  the  states  replied  worth- 
ily to  a  bribe  from  the  foreign  bully,  many 
other  politicians  were  sufficiently  wild  and 
weak,  though  doubtless  patriotic  in  inten- 
tion. One  was  set  to  restrain  the  journal- 
ists, and  had  to  be  restrained  himself,  for 


The  Awakening  of  England      161 

being  more  sensational  than  any  of  them. 
Another  scolded  the  working-classes  in  the 
style  of  an  intoxicated  temperance  lecturer. 
But  England  was  saved  by  a  forgotten  thing 
— the  English.  Simple  men  with  simple  mo- 
tives, the  chief  one  a  hate  of  injustice  which 
grows  simpler  the  longer  we  stare  at  it,  came 
out  of  their  dreary  tenements  and  their  tidy 
shops,  their  fields  and  their  suburbs  and 
their  factories  and  their  rookeries,  and  asked 
for  the  arms  of  men.  In  a  throng  that  was 
at  last  three  million  men,  the  islanders  went 
forth  from  their  island,  as  simply  as  the 
mountaineers  had  gone  forth  from  their 
mountain,  with  their  faces  to  the  dawn^ 


X — The  Battle  of  the  Marne 

THE  impression  produced  by  the 
first  week  of  war  was  that  the 
British  contingent  had  come  just 
in  time  for  the  end  of  the  world. 
Or  rather,  for  any  sensitive  and  civilised 
man,  touched  by  the  modern  doubt  but  by  the 
equally  modern  mysticism,  that  old  theo- 
cratic vision  fell  far  short  of  the  sickening 
terror  of  the  time.  For  it  was  a  day  of 
judgment  in  which  upon  the  throne  in  heaven 
and  above  the  cherubim,  sat  not  God,  but 
another. 

The  British  had  been  posted  at  the  ex- 
treme western  end  of  the  allied  line  in  the 
north.  The  other  end  rested  on  the  secure 
city  and  fortress  of  Namur;  their  end  rested 
upon  nothing.  It  is  not  wholly  a  sentimental 
fancy  to  say  that  there  was  something  for- 
lorn in  the  position  of  that  loose  end  in  a 
strange  land,  with  only  the  sad  fields  of 
Northern  France  between  them  and  the  sea. 
For  it  was  really  round  that  loose  end  that 

the  foe  would  probably  fling  the  lasso  of  his 
163 


164  The  Crimes  of  England 

charge;  it  was  here  that  death  might  soon 
be  present  upon  every  side.  It  must  be  re- 
membered that  many  critics,  including  many 
Englishmen,  doubted  whether  a  rust  had  not 
eaten  into  this  as  into  other  parts  of  the  na- 
tional life,  feared  that  England  had  too  long 
neglected  both  the  ethic  and  the  technique 
of  war,  and  would  prove  a  weak  link  in  the 
chain.  The  enemy  was  absolutely  certain 
that  it  was  so.  To  these  men,  standing  dis- 
consolately amid  the  hedgeless  plains  and 
poplars,  came  the  news  that  Namur  was 
gone,  which  was  to  their  captains  one  of 
the  four  corners  of  the  earth.  The  two 
armies  had  touched;  and  instantly  the 
weaker  took  an  electric  shock  which  told  of 
electric  energy,  deep  into  deep  Germany,  bat- 
tery behind  battery  of  abysmal  force.  In  the 
instant  it  was  discovered  that  the  enemy  was 
more  numerous  than  they  had  dreamed.  He 
was  actually  more  numerous  even  than  they 
discovered.  Every  oncoming  horseman 
doubled  as  in  a  drunkard's  vision ;  and  they 
were  soon  striving  without  speech  in  a  night- 
mare of  numbers.  Then  all  the  allied  forces 
at  the  front  were  overthrown  in  the  tragic 
battle  of  Mons ;  and  began  that  black  retreat, 


The.  Battle  of  the  Marne        165 

in  which  so  many  of  our  young  men  knew 
war  first  and  at  its  worst  in  this  terrible 
world ;  and  so  many  never  returned. 

In  that  blackness  began  to  grow  strange 
emotions,  long  unfamiliar  to  our  blood. 
Those  six  dark  days  are  as  full  of  legends  as 
the  six  centuries  of  the  Dark  Ages.  Many 
of  these  may  be  exaggerated  fancies,  one 
was  certainly  an  avowed  fiction,  others  are 
quite  different  from  it  and  more  difficult  to 
dissipate  into  the  daylight.  But  one  curious 
fact  remains  about  them  if  they  were  all  lies, 
or  even  if  they  were  all  deliberate  works  of 
art.  Not  one  of  them  referred  to  those  close, 
crowded,  and  stirring  three  centuries  which 
are  nearest  to  us,  and  which  alone  are  cov- 
ered in  this  sketch,  the  centuries  during 
which  the  Teutonic  influence  had  expanded 
itself  over  our  islands.  Ghosts  were  there 
perhaps,  but  they  were  the  ghosts  of  forgot- 
ten ancestors.  Nobody  saw  Cromwell  or 
even  Wellington ;  nobody  so  much  as  thought 
about  Cecil  Rhodes.  Things  were  either 
seen  or  said  among  the  British  which  linked 
them  up,  in  matters  deeper  than  any  alliance, 
with  the  French,  who  spoke  of  Joan  of  Arc 
in  heaven  above  the  fated  city;  or  the  Rus- 


166         The  Crimes  of  England 

sians  who  dreamed  of  the  Mother  of  God 
with  her  hand  pointing  to  the  west.  They 
were  the  visions  or  the  inventions  of  a  me- 
diaeval army;  and  a  prose  poet  was  in  line 
with  many  popular  rumours  when  he  told  of 
ghostly  archers  crying  "Array,  Array,"  as  in 
that  long-disbanded  yeomanry  in  which  I 
have  fancied  Cobbett  as  carrying  a  bow. 
Other  tales,  true  or  only  symptomatic,  told 
of  one  on  a  great  white  horse  who  was  not 
the  victor  of  Blenheim  or  even  the  Black 
Prince,  but  a  faint  figure  out  of  far-off  mar- 
tyrologies — St.  George.  One  soldier  is  as- 
serted to  have  claimed  to  identify  the  saint 
because  he  was  "on  every  quid."  On  the 
coins,  St.  George  is  a  Roman  soldier. 

But  these  fancies,  if  they  were  fancies, 
might  well  seem  the  last  sickly  flickerings 
of  an  old-world  order  now  finally  wounded 
to  the  death.  That  which  was  coming  on, 
with  the  whole  weight  of  a  new  world,  was 
something  that  had  never  been  numbered 
among  the  Seven  Champions  of  Christen- 
dom. Now,  in  more  doubtful  and  more  hope- 
ful days,  it  is  almost  impossible  to  repicture 
what  was,  for  those  who  understood,  the  gi- 
gantic finality  of  the  first  German  strides. 


The  Battle  of  the  Marne        167 

It  seemed  as  if  the  forces  of  the  ancient  val- 
our fell  away  to  right  and  left;  and  there 
opened  a  grand,  smooth  granite  road  right 
to  the  gate  of  Paris,  down  which  the  great 
Germania  moved  like  a  tall,  unanswerable 
sphinx,  whose  pride  could  destroy  all  things 
and  survive  them.  In  her  train  moved,  like 
moving  mountains,  Cyclopean  guns  that  had 
never  been  seen  among  men,  before  which 
walled  cities  melted  like  wax,  their  mouths 
set  insolently  upwards  as  if  threatening  to 
besiege  the  sun.  Nor  is  it  fantastic  to  speak 
so  of  the  new  and  abnormal  armaments;  for 
the  soul  of  Germany  was  really  expressed 
in  colossal  wheels  and  cylinders;  and  her 
guns  were  more  symbolic  than  her  flags. 
Then  and  now,  and  in  every  place  and  time, 
it  is  to  be  noted  that  the  German  superiority 
has  been  in  a  certain  thing  and  of  a  certain 
kind.  It  is  not  unity;  it  is  not,  in  the  moral 
sense,  discipline.  Nothing  can  be  more 
united  in  a  moral  sense  than  a  French,  Brit- 
ish, or  Russian  regiment.  Nothing,  for  that 
matter,  could  be  more  united  than  a  High- 
land clan  at  Killiecrankie  or  a  rush  of  relig- 
ious fanatics  in  the  Soudan.  What  such  en- 
gines, in  such  size  and  multiplicity,  really 


168  The  Crimes  of  England 

meant  was  this:  they  meant  a  type  of  life 
naturally  intolerable  to  happier  and  more 
healthy-minded  men,  conducted  on  a  larger 
scale  and  consuming  larger  populations  than 
had  ever  been  known  before.  They  meant 
cities  growing  larger  than  provinces,  fac- 
tories growing  larger  than  cities ;  they  meant 
the  empire  of  the  slum.  They  meant  a  de- 
gree of  detailed  repetition  and  dehumanised 
division  of  labour,  to  which  no  man  born 
would  surrender  his  brief  span  in  the  sun- 
shine, if  he  could  hope  to  beat  his  plough- 
share into  a  sword.  The  nations  of  the 
earth  were  not  to  surrender  to  the  Kaiser; 
they  were  to  surrender  to  Krupp,  his  master 
and  theirs;  the  French,  the  British,  the  Rus- 
sians were  to  surrender  to  Krupp  as  the 
Germans  themselves,  after  a  few  swiftly 
broken  strikes,  had  already  surrendered  to 
Krupp.  Through  every  cogwheel  in  that 
incomparable  machinery,  through  every  link 
in  that  iron  and  unending  chain,  ran  the 
mastery  and  the  skill  of  a  certain  kind  of 
artist ;  an  artist  whose  hands  are  never  idle 
through  dreaming  or  drawn  back  in  disgust 
or  lifted  in  wonder  or  in  wrath ;  but  sure  and 
tireless  in  their  touch  upon  the  thousand 


The^  Battle  of  the  Marne        169 

little  things  that  make  the  invisible  machin- 
ery of  life.  That  artist  was  there  in  tri- 
umph; but  he  had  no  name.  The  ancient 
world  called  him  the  Slave. 

From  this  advancing  machine  of  millions, 
the  slighter  array  of  the  Allies,  and  espe- 
cially the  British  at  their  ultimate  outpost, 
saved  themselves  by  a  succession  of  hair's- 
breadth  escapes  and  what  must  have  seemed 
to  the  soldiers  the  heartrending  luck  of  a 
mouse  before  a  cat.  Again  and  again  Von 
Kluck's  cavalry,  supported  by  artillery  and 
infantry,  clawed  round  the  end  of  the  Brit- 
ish force,  which  eluded  it  as  by  leaping  back 
again  and  again.  Sometimes  the  pursuer 
was,  so  to  speak,  so  much  on  top  of  his  prey 
that  it  could  not  even  give  way  to  him;  but 
had  to  hit  such  blows  as  it  could  in  the  hope 
of  checking  him  for  the  instant  needed  for 
escape.  Sometimes  the  oncoming  wave  was 
so  close  that  a  small  individual  accident,  the 
capture  of  one  man,  would  mean  the  wash- 
ing out  of  a  whole  battalion.  For  day  after 
day  this  living  death  endured.  And  day  af- 
ter day  a  certain  dark  truth  began  to  be  re- 
vealed, bit  by  bit,  certainly  to  the  incredu- 
lous wonder  of  the  Prussians,  quite  possibly 


170         The  Crimes  of  England 


to  the  surprise  of  the  French,  and  quite  as 
possibly  to  the  surprise  of  themselves;  that 
there  was  something  singular  about  the 
British  soldiers.  That  singular  thing  may- 
be expressed  in  a  variety  of  ways;  but  it 
would  be  almost  certainly  expressed  insuffi- 
ciently by  anyone  who  had  not  had  the  moral 
courage  to  face  the  facts  about  his  country 
in  the  last  decades  before  the  war.  It  may 
perhaps  be  best  expressed  by  saying  that 
some  thousands  of  Englishmen  were  dead: 
and  that  England  was  not. 

The  fortress  of  Maubeuge  had  gaped,  so 
to  speak,  offering  a  refuge  for  the  unresting 
and  tormented  retreat;  the  British  Generals 
had  refused  it  and  continued  to  fight  a  losing 
fight  in  the  open  for  the  sake  of  the  common 
plan.  At  night  an  enormous  multitude  of 
Germans  had  come  unexpectedly  through 
the  forest  and  caught  a  smaller  body  of  the 
British  in  Landrecies;  failed  to  dislodge 
them  and  lost  a  whole  battalion  in  that  battle 
of  the  darkness.  At  the  extreme  end  of  the 
line  Smith-Dorrien's  division,  who  seemed 
to  be  nearly  caught  or  cut  off,  had  fought 
with  one  gun  against  four,  and  so  hammered 
the  Germans  that  they  were  forced  to  let  go 


The.  Battle  of  the  Marne         171 

their  hold;  and  the  British  were  again  free. 
When  the  blowing  up  of  a  bridge  announced 
that  they  had  crossed  the  last  river,  some- 
thing other  than  that  battered  remnant  was 
saved;  it  was  the  honour  of  the  thing  by 
which  we  live. 

The  driven  and  defeated  line  stood  at  last 
almost  under  the  walls  of  Paris;  and  the 
world  waited  for  the  doom  of  the  city.  The 
gates  seemed  to  stand  open;  and  the  Prus- 
sian was  to  ride  into  it  for  the  third  and  the 
last  time :  for  the  end  of  its  long  epic  of  lib- 
erty and  equality  was  come.  And  still  the 
very  able  and  very  French  individual  on 
whom  rested  the  last  hope  of  the  seemingly 
hopeless  Alliance  stood  unruffled  as  a  rock, 
in  every  angle  of  his  sky-blue  jacket  and  his 
bulldog  figure.  He  had  called  his  bewildered 
soldiers  back  when  they  had  broken  the  inva- 
sion at  Guise ;  he  had  silently  digested  the  re- 
sponsibility of  dragging  on  the  retreat,  as  in 
despair,  to  the  last  desperate  leagues  before 
the  capital ;  and  he  stood  and  watched.  And 
even  as  he  watched  the  whole  huge  invasion 
swerved. 

Out  through  Paris  and  out  and  around  be- 
yond Paris,  other  men  in  dim  blue  coats 


172  The  Crimes  of  England 

swung  out  in  long  lines  upon  the  plain, 
slowly  folding  upon  Von  Kluck  like  blue 
wings.  Von  Kluck  stood  an  instant;  and 
then,  flinging  a  few  secondary  forces  to  de- 
lay the  wing  that  was  swinging  round  on 
him,  dashed  across  the  Allies'  line  at  a  des- 
perate angle,  to  smash  it  in  the  centre  as  with 
a  hammer.  It  was  less  desperate  than  it 
seemed;  for  he  counted,  and  might  well 
count,  on  the  moral  and  physical  bankruptcy 
of  the  British  line  and  the  end  of  the  French 
line  immediately  in  front  of  him,  which  for 
six  days  and  nights  he  had  chased  before 
him  like  autumn  leaves  before  a  whirlwind. 
Not  unlike  autumn  leaves,  red-stained,  dust- 
hued,  and  tattered,  they  lay  there  as  if  swept 
into  a  corner.  But  even  as  their  conquerors 
wheeled  eastwards,  their  bugles  blew  the 
charge;  and  the  English  went  forward 
through  the  wood  that  is  called  Cregy,  and 
stamped  it  with  their  seal  for  the  second 
time,  in  the  highest  moment  of  all  the  secu- 
lar history  of  man. 

But  it  was  not  now  the  Cregy  in  which 
English  and  French  knights  had  met  in  a 
more  coloured  age,  in  a  battle  that  was 
rather  a  tournament.    It  was  a  league  of  all 


The  Battle  of  the  Marne         173 

knights  for  the  remains  of  all  knighthood, 
of  all  brotherhood  in  arms  or  in  arts,  against 
that  which  is  and  has  been  radically  un- 
knightly  and  radically  unbrotherly  from  the 
beginning.  Much  was  to  happen  after — 
murder  and  flaming  folly  and  madness  in 
earth  and  sea  and  sky;  but  all  men  knew 
in  their  hearts  that  the  third  Prussian  thrust 
had  failed,  and  Christendom  was  delivered 
once  more.  The  empire  of  blood  and  iron 
rolled  slowly  back  towards  the  darkness  of 
the  northern  forests;  and  the  great  nations 
of  the  West  went  forward;  where  side  by 
side  as  after  a  long  lover's  quarrel,  went  the 
ensigns  of  St.  Denys  and  St.  George. 


NOTE  ON  THE  WORD  "ENGLISH" 

The  words  "England"  and  "English"  as  used  here 
require  a  word  of  explanation,  if  only  to  anticipate 
the  ire  of  the  inevitable  Scot.  To  begin  with,  the 
word  "British"  involves  a  similar  awkwardness.  I 
have  tried  to  use  it  in  the  one  or  two  cases  that  re- 
ferred to  such  things  as  military  glory  and  unity: 
though  I  am  sure  I  have  failed  of  full  consistency 
in  so  complex  a  matter.  The  difficulty  is  that  this 
sense  of  glory  and  unity,  which  should  certainly 
cover  the  Scotch,  should  also  cover  the  Irish.  And 
while  it  is  fairly  safe  to  call  a  Scotsman  a  North 
Briton  (despite  the  just  protest  of  Stevenson),  it  is 
very  unsafe  indeed  to  call  an  Irishman  a  West 
Briton.  But  there  is  a  deeper  difficulty.  I  can  as- 
sure the  Scot  that  I  say  "England,"  not  because  I 
deny  Scottish  nationality,  but  because  I  affirm  it. 
And  I  can  say,  further,  that  I  could  not  here  include 
Scots  in  the  thesis,  simply  because  I  could  not  in- 
clude them  in  the  condemnation.  This  book  is  a 
study,  not  of  a  disease  but  rather  of  a  weakness, 
which  has  only  been  predominant  in  the  predominant 
partner".  It  would  not  be  true,  for  instance,  to  say 
either  of  Ireland  or  Scotland  that  the  populace 
lacked  a  religion;  but  I  do  think  that  British  policy 
as  a  whole  has  suffered  from  the  English  lack  of 
one,  with  its  inevitable  result  of  plutocracy  and 
class  contempt. 


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